Both the Nasdaq and S&P 500 hit record highs overnight, adding 1.1% and 0.3% respectively, as bond yields continued to fall.
This comes despite news overnight that the US inflation rate had jumped significantly in March to 2.6%, well above the 1.7% in February and sub 1% figures from 2020.
Predictably, the rise was almost solely due to energy costs, including fuel and electricity, as conditions return to normal in the world’s biggest economy.
Rather than showing concern, this reiterated the Federal Reserve’s recent comments that inflation should be expected, but that they would not be raising rates unless it was out of control.
According to Bloomberg, traders are now more concerned about inflation and higher rates than the coronavirus.
Turning to company-specific news, here are some of the bigger stories.
Johnson & Johnson vaccine paused
Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) was forced to pause the rollout of its vaccine over blood-clot issues at the same time Biden confirmed he had enough vaccines for the entire country.
This was likely the driver of a rally in stay-at-home stocks on Tuesday, with the likes of Zoom (NASDAQ: ZM), Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM) and DocuSign (NASDAQ: DOCU) jumping by around 5%.
Uber’s record month
Rideshare and food delivery platform Uber Technologies (NYSE: UBER) jumped 2.1% after reporting record annualised bookings in March of US$52 billion and suggesting the company could reach breakeven far quicker than expected in 2021.
Cloudflare partners up
Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) announced a partnership with chip-maker NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) to bring artificial intelligence to Cloudflare’s global network at scale.
“The combination of NVIDIA accelerated computing technology and Cloudflare’s edge network will create a massive platform on which developers can deploy applications that use pre-trained or custom machine learning models in seconds,” the announcement read.
Cloudflare stock surged 11.3% on the news, while NVIDIA jumped 3.1%.
