What’s News in Markets: AI Jitters, Robinhood’s Slide and the Rotation Trade

Hey, listeners. It's Saturday, February 14th. I'm Hannah Aaron-Lang for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News in Markets, our look at the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. So let's get into it. We got a pair of economic reports this past week on the jobs market and inflation. More on that later in the show. But first, concerns about the future for artificial intelligence rippled through markets this week, but not necessarily in the way you'd expect. We've seen these periodic waves of AI jitters way on stocks for some time now. Typically, the focus has been on the big tech companies leading the AI investing boom, Amazon or Alphabet, for example, and whether those quote-unquote hyperscalers are spending too much money trying to get ahead in the AI arms race. This week, however, there was a new anxiety dragging down stock prices the fear that AI will disrupt key industries across the economy and eventually make some companies obsolete Those concerns have affected a really wide range of stocks Last week it was software companies that got hit This past Tuesday, it was wealth management and brokerage shares like Charles Schwab and Raymond James, which tumbled after news of a new AI tool for tax advice. For the week, the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite dropped 2.1%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.2%. The broad-based S&P 500 ended the week 1.4% lower. One of the strangest examples of this new wave of AI fears was Thursday's slide in transportation stocks. The apparent trigger was a news release from a Florida firm called Algorithm Holdings that said it could use AI to improve efficiency in the trucking business. Algorithm's main business was once selling karaoke machines, as my colleague Ryan December reported this week Still in the wake of that release investors dumped stocks across the transportation sector Shares of the logistics company Expeditors International of Washington about 13 percent suffering their worst day since 1998, which, for some context, is the year that I was born. Investors have been rotating out of tech, crypto, and other speculative plays for some time now. Instead, they're betting on a broader array of companies that could benefit if economic growth continues. Data released this past week indicated that the economy is still in a relatively good spot. Reports from the Labor Department showed the U.S. economy added more jobs than expected and that inflation is cooling. This rotation is benefiting companies like Walmart, which is set to report earnings this upcoming week. The company recently hit a market cap of $1 trillion for the first time, and the stock climbed more than 2% over the last week. Investors are moving money into companies whose business models have a low chance of being disrupted by AI. And if that trade continues stocks like Walmart could continue to benefit So far this year the stock is up more than 20 And in the world of digital assets the crypto winter has dragged on That impacting companies that even recently were some of the stars of the stock market. Shares of Robinhood markets ended the week down 8.3%. It's a pretty steep fall from grace for Robinhood. Last year, the company was one of the top-performing members of the entire S&P 500 index. But the decline in cryptocurrency prices has hit them hard. On its earnings call this past week, Robinhood executives said crypto transaction revenue was down 38 percent from a year ago. Shares of the online brokerage sank nearly 9 percent the following day and are down more than 30 percent this year. And now you know what's news in markets this week. Today's show was produced by Alexis Moore with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Hannah Aaron Lang. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next Saturday.