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• US stocks jumped on Monday as investors get ready for a slew of corporate earnings results. 
• About 25% of the S&P 500 is expected to report their fourth-quarter earnings this week.
• Tech stocks led the way higher on Monday after Spotify cut 6% of its workforce and an activist investor bought Salesforce. 

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US stocks surged on Monday, with the S&P 500 jumping above the closely-watched 4,000 level and its 200-day moving average. 

The strong session on Monday extends big gains from Friday as investors assess a stream of corporate news and earnings results.

About 25% of companies in the S&P 500 are set to report fourth-quarter results this week. Of the 57 companies that have already reported results so far, 67% beat profit estimates by a median of 5%, while 67% beat revenue estimates by a median of 2%, according to data from Fundstrat.

More layoffs hit the tech sector on Monday, with Spotify saying it plans to cut 6% of its workforce, or about 600 employees. The job cuts from Spotify are after Amazon, Alphabet, Salesforce, and Microsoft all cut jobs in recent weeks. Shares of Spotify jumped as much as 5% before paring those gains. 

Here’s where US indexes stood at the 4:00 p.m. ET close on Monday:

• S&P 500: 4,019.65, up 1.18%
• Dow Jones Industrial Average: 33,628.84, up 0.76% (253.35 points)
• Nasdaq Composite: 11,364.41, up 2.01%

Here’s what else happened today:

• Activist investor Elliott Management took a multi-billion dollar stake in Salesforce after the stock fell 50% from its peak. Shares of Salesforce jumped 3%.
• FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried held just under $50 million in an account with little-known Farmington State Bank, located in rural Washington state, according to a court filing published Friday.
• Janet Yellen has crushed hopes the US Treasury could mint a $1 trillion platinum coin to help cover the country’s bills as it struggles with a debt default.
• “It truly is not by any means to be taken as a given that the Fed would do it, and I think especially with something that’s a gimmick,” Treasury Secretary Yellen said in a Wall Street Journal interview published Sunday, referring to the possibility that the Treasury could mint a $1 trillion coin to avoid the US defaulting on its debts.
• Billionaire Ken Griffin’s hedge fund Citadel surpassed rivals by earning a record $16 billion in profit for investors last year – the largest hedge fund gain in history.  

In commodities, bonds and crypto:

• West Texas Intermediate crude oil rose 0.04% to $81.67 per barrel. Brent crude, oil’s international benchmark, jumped 0.52% to $88.09.
• Gold rose 0.23% to $1,932.70 per ounce.
• The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose five basis points to 3.53%.
• Bitcoin rose 0.92% to $22,968, while ether dropped 0.34% to $1,630. 

ChatGPT might be on its way to earning an MBA from Wharton, which has long boasted one of the top MBA programs in the country.

David Tran Photo/Shutterstock

• Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch tested ChatGPT with questions from his final exam.
• Terwiesch found that ChatGPT could answer basic questions well but sometimes made “surprising mistakes” in simple calculations.
• Terwiesch concluded that ChatGPT might earn a B or B- on his final exam.

If ChatGPT were enrolled in Wharton’s MBA program, what kind of student would it be?

A B or B- candidate, according to Christian Terwiesch, a Wharton professor who recently tested the technology with questions from his final exam in operations management — once a required class for all MBA students — and published his findings. 

ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that generates its own text as opposed to responding to existing prompts, has stirred up considerable commotion in the education system since it was released in November 2022. The bot has been used to generate essays, which has lead to growing concerns about plagiarism among teachers.  In January, the New York City Department of Education announced a ban on ChatGPT across its school system.

Others argue that ChatGPT can increase the efficiency of teachers and even make education more fair. Safe to say— ChatGPT has raised many questions about the future of the education system. 

According to Terwiesch, ChatGPT does an “amazing job” answering basic operations questions based on case studies: focused examinations of a person, group, or company, and the holy grail of business school education. 

For example, Terwiesch proposed the following question to ChatGPT:

World-Antique is a new venture under development by two graduates of a New England business school. The value proposition of the venture is simple: purchase antique paintings at yard sales and auctions and then sell them at quadruple the purchase price via a simple eCommerce site (i.e., a painting that is purchased for $100 would be sold at $400).

Based on an analysis of similar retailers, the founders expect to turn their inventory 1.5 times per year.

To achieve an annual revenue of $3,000,000, how much inventory expressed in $’s should the founders expect their operation to require?

To which, ChatGPT answered:

“To achieve an annual revenue of $3,000,000, the founders need to sell $3,000,000 / 4 = $750,000 worth of paintings per year.

Since they expect to turn their inventory 1.5 times per year, they need to have $750,000 / 1.5 = $500,000 worth of inventory at any given time.

Therefore, the founders should expect their operation to require $500,000 worth of inventory.”

Terwiesch deemed this “short and sweet” and worthy of an A+. 

In other instances though, ChatGPT made mistakes in calculations that Terwiesch said only required 6th-grade-level math. He noted that it also struggled with more complex questions that required an understanding of how multiple inputs and outputs worked together. 

But when given a hint to question, ChatGPT quickly and correctly modified its answers. Based on that, Terwiesch noted that having “a ‘human in the loop’ can be very valuable.”

Since ChatGPT has become known for generating novel content, Terwiesch also decided to see how well it could do his job — writing its own exam questions. The questions it generated would probably require substantial editing, Terwiesch noted, but he also found them humorous and said he’d rely on ChatGPT for preparing future exams. 

Amidst all the frenzy on how ChatGPT might impact the way we learn, Terwiesch offers a heartening case for its use as a tool to help humans. 

He wrote, “We have many reasons to believe that the technology is getting better over time. But, we are still far from an A+ for complex problems and we still need a human in the loop.”

 

An 11th victim died from injuries on Monday after an elderly gunman’s deadly rampage at a Los Angeles-area dance hall, California police said, as authorities were still searching for a motive behind one of the state’s worst mass shootings.

Police identified 72-year-old Huu Can Tran as the suspect in the massacre, which took place during a Lunar New Year celebration at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, a dance hall popular with older patrons of Asian descent.

Tran allegedly killed 10 people on Saturday night and wounded 10 others, then traveled to another dance hall where his attack was thwarted. He later fatally shot himself. An 11th person had died on Monday from injuries sustained during the shooting, Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese told reporters.

Tran, whom a former tenant described to Reuters as “angry and distrustful,” killed 10 people between the ages of 50 and 80 and wounded 10 others, police said.

On Sunday, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said “everything is on the table” in terms of identifying the reasons for the shooting.

Officers in Hemet, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles, were assisting the county Sheriff’s Department in a search of Tran’s mobile home in a gated senior living community, said Alan Reyes, spokesperson for the Hemet Police Department.

The search began at around 8:30 p.m. Sunday and continued on Monday, Reyes said, adding that Tran had not been known to Hemet police.

Tran had an active trucking license and had owned a company called Tran’s Trucking Inc with a post office box address in Monterey Park, according to online records. He had lived in the Los Angeles area since at least the 1990s and moved to the mobile home in Hemet in 2020, address records showed.

Adam Hood, a longtime tenant of the alleged gunman at a property in the Los Angeles area, told Reuters Tran was an aggressive and suspicious person who had few friends. But he liked ballroom dancing, largely his only social activity.

Hood said Tran complained that people at the Star Ballroom studio were talking behind his back.

“He was a good dancer in my opinion,” Hood said. “But he was distrustful of the people at the studio, angry and distrustful. I think he just had enough.”

Tran’s rampage could have been worse. About 20 minutes after the shooting in Monterey Park, he entered the Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio dance club in the neighboring city of Alhambra. There, Brandon Tsay, who operates the family-run dance hall, wrestled a weapon away from the shooter before he could get a shot off.

“That moment, it was primal instinct,” Tsay told the New York Times, saying that the gunman fled the scene after a 90-second struggle. “Something happened there. I don’t know what came over me.”

About 12 hours later, police officers in Torrance, 20 miles southwest of Monterey Park, cornered a white cargo van that Tran was driving. As officers neared the van, they heard a single gun shot from inside as Tran killed himself.

Authorities have not yet released names of all the victims, pending notification of their families, but all were between 50 and 80 years old. The Los Angeles Coroner’s Office said two women, My Nhan, 65, and Lilan Li, 63, were among the dead. ABC News identified one of the deceased as dance instructor Ming Wei Ma.

A candlelight vigil was scheduled for Monday evening at Monterey Park’s City Hall to honor the victims.

Luna said the pistol that Tran used was likely illegal in California, having a magazine whose capacity exceeded the state limit of 10 rounds.

The shooting took place during a two-day Chinese Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, which draws thousands of people from across Southern California.

As news about the shooting spread, some in the tight-knit community of Monterey Park initially feared it was a hate crime targeting Asians. The city of 60,000 people has for decades been a destination for immigrants from China. Around 65% of its residents are Asian, according to U.S. Census data.

At the entrance to the Star Dance studio on Monday, residents left flowers, fruit and candles to honor the dead.

Yashin Wang, 65, sat at a bus stop close to the crime scene on Monday. He said he had moved to Monterey Park from Dallas, Texas, two years ago because he had been told what a peaceful and friendly place the city was.

“It was nice,” he said.

Wang said he planned to stay, but the massacre had saddened him and shaken his perception of his home.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday that changes in senior positions in government and in the regions would be made within a day.

“There are already personnel decisions – some today, some tomorrow – regarding officials of various levels in ministries and other central government structures, as well as in the regions and in the law enforcement system,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.

The president had previously pledged to crack down on corruption at all levels amid a series of allegations of bribe-taking and dubious practices.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Ticketmaster learned “valuable lessons” when the Taylor Swift concert tickets sale last year was disrupted by record bot traffic, the parent company will tell a U.S. Senate committee on Tuesday.

“In hindsight there are several things we could have done better – including staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets,” Live Nation Entertainment President and Chief Financial Officer Joe Berchtold said in written testimony released by the company ahead of Tuesday’s hearing.

Ticketmaster has come under harsh criticism from fans and lawmakers, accusing it of having too much control over the market for concert tickets.

“The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve,” Senator Amy Klobuchar said.

In November, Ticketmaster was deluged with more than 3.5 billion requests from fans, bots and scalpers that overwhelmed its website, and the company canceled a planned ticket sale to the general public for Swift’s “Eras” tour, her first in five years.

At the time, Swift said it was “excruciating” for her to watch fans struggle to secure tickets and that she had been assured that Ticketmaster could handle large demand.

Swift said she was “not going to make excuses for anyone” because her team had been assured multiple times by ticket sellers that they could handle a surge in demand.

Ticketmaster said more than 2 million “presale” tickets were sold for Swift’s tour, a single-day record for an artist.

Berchtold’s testimony said Live Nation has invested over $1 billion over the years to improve Ticketmaster.

“We also need to recognize how industrial scalpers breaking the law using bots and cyberattacks to try to unfairly gain tickets contributes to an awful consumer experience,” Berchtold said, calling on Congress to adopt reforms.

Witnesses at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “That’s The Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment” will also include top executives from SeatGeek Inc and Jam Productions LLC and Ticketmaster critic Clyde Lawrence, a singer-songwriter in the band Lawrence.

“As Live Nation leverages its power across the concert ecosystem to increase its profits, concertgoers see higher prices, and artists experience challenging touring dynamics,” Lawrence wrote in a New York Times essay last month. “Whether it meets the legal definition of a monopoly or not, Live Nation’s control of the live music ecosystem is staggering.”

Ticketmaster has denied any anti-competitive practices and remains under a consent decree with the Justice Department following its 2010 merger with Live Nation.

Berchtold said the “U.S. ticketing markets have never been more competitive than they are today,” citing the emergence of the enormous secondary ticketing market and new primary competitors like SeatGeek.

Live Nation included letters of support with its testimony including one from singer Garth Brooks who asked” My question is, as a country, why don’t we just make scalping illegal? The

crush of bots during an on-sale is a huge reason for program failure.”

South America is not likely to have a common currency bloc to rival the euro any time soon, analysts said on Monday, despite excited chatter sparked by officials in Brazil and Argentina raising the prospect of a shared tender.

On Monday Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentine President Alberto Fernandez said they were in early talks to establish a shared unit of value for bilateral trade, though this would not replace the real or peso currencies.

That came after the leaders had touted a “common South American currency” on Sunday and officials told the Financial Times the tender could even be called the “sur” and eventually look to bring in other countries around South America.

Analysts were quick to knock that down, following decades of similar talk with little to show for it, including shelved plans for a so-called “gaucho” for Argentina-Brazil trade in 1987 and former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro touting a currency union in 2019.

“I’m very skeptical this initiative will see the light of day,” said Alejo Czerwonko, Chief Investment Officer Emerging Markets Americas at UBS Global Wealth Management, citing the region’s poor track record in economic integration.

“It has failed to achieve simpler integration goals than that of a common currency.”

A common tender, like the euro, would need shared political frameworks and institutions that analysts said would take decades to establish. South America’s countries have vastly different economic situations – Argentina, for instance, has struggled with inflation for a long time, and it is currently at an eye-watering annual rate of 95%.

Venezuela – whose president Nicolas Maduro said on Monday that his country was prepared to support an initiative such as a common currency – has suffered with even higher hyperinflation as well as economic collapse. Other South American economies, including Uruguay and Chile, have long been more stable.

“It’s been a conversation for many years. I see the benefit for Argentina but what’s in it for Brazil? Much less Uruguay and Paraguay,” said Eric Farnsworth, a vice president at the Council of the Americas and Americas Society.

He called the idea of a currency union a “fantasy.”

Kimberley Sperrfechter, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, said that Lula, inaugurated this month, had other things to focus on, including his economic and fiscal plans. Currency union talk was just a distraction, she said.

“Markets are likely to be unimpressed by the news of a combined currency, not least because it will take years to implement, if it’s implemented at all,” she said.

In Argentina, meanwhile, general elections in October could see center-left Fernandez toppled by a resurgent conservative opposition, likely scuppering any longer-term currency plans between the two leftist allies.

Todd Martinez, a director at Fitch Ratings’ sovereigns group focused on Latin America, said the two countries appeared to be unlikely partners to form a successful currency union, given their diverging economies.

Hasnain Malik, head of equity research at Tellimer, agreed, emphasizing that it made even less sense for Brazil – the region’s biggest economy, with a currency that outperformed the dollar last year. Argentina’s peso, on the other hand, has slumped despite strict currency controls.

“For Brazil in particular, despite its own policy credibility challenges, why it would wish to tie itself to a smaller neighbor with such a checkered track record on policy credibility is anyone’s guess,” he said in a note.

But some were more optimistic about the long-term potential.

“The process of LatAm integration needs a North Star — and this is the best possible one. Because it would create a larger single market and better negotiating conditions with other large blocs,” Pierpaolo Barbieri, head of Argentine digital payments firm Uala, wrote on Twitter.

“Of course a monetary union between Brazil and Argentina is unrealistic today.”

The video of Memphis police beating a Black man who died after a traffic stop on Jan. 7 reminded civil rights attorney Ben Crump of the assault on Rodney King, Crump said after viewing the police bodycam recording with the man’s family on Monday.

Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old father of a 4-year-old boy, died in the hospital on Jan. 10 of injuries he sustained during his arrest by five officers, all of whom have been fired.

“He was a human pinata for those police officers,” said attorney Tony Romanucci, Crump’s co-counsel.

The department determined after an investigation that the officers violated multiple policies, including using excessive force, failing to intervene and failing to render aid.

Crump said the video reminded him of how Los Angeles police repeatedly beat King in video captured by a witness in 1991, sparking protests and reforms in the department.

“Regrettably, it reminded us of (the) Rodney King video,” said Crump, who previously represented the families of George Floyd and Trayvon Martin. “Regrettably, unlike Rodney King, Tyre didn’t survive.”

Nichols was less than 100 yards (meters) from home during the traffic stop and called out for this mother three times at the end of the video, Crump told a news conference.

Crump viewed the police bodycam video with Nichols’ family, later telling reporters that local, state and federal investigators promised to release the video to the public within a week or two. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, FBI and Justice Department are investigating the incident in addition to Memphis police and the Shelby County District attorney.

Memphis police are cooperating, said Chief Cerelyn Davis.

“Transparency remains a priority in this incident, and a premature release could adversely impact the criminal investigation and the judicial process,” she said.

Nichols’ family said he suffered injuries including brain swelling and kidney failure and was placed on dialysis before he died, according to the Commercial Appeal newspaper.

Relatives told WREG television it was especially hurtful because all the officers involved were Black.

A photo of a bloodied, intubated Nichols was released to the public. It helped fuel multiple days of protests and calls of “Justice for Tyre” in Memphis, a city with a majority Black population. A demonstration was held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day outside the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where the civil rights leader was shot dead in 1968.

Memphis police on Friday identified the former officers as Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills, Jr., and Justin Smith. Each had served with the department approximately 2-1/2 to 5 years.

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