Markets And The Midterm Years | Robinhood’s Shrinking Value | NFTs' Trading Boom

Plus: Biden's First Year: An Economic Scorecard

Good morning.

With midterms looming in November, the first weeks of 2022 offered a rocky start for a deadlocked Congress and the stock market—here’s how various election results may impact stocks, according to historical data. We’re also covering how Robinhood's share price slump impacted its cofounders’ fortune, and NFT trading on billion-dollar platform OpenSea soared to new highs. Finally, as President Joe Biden marks one year in the White House, we assess his administration’s economic performance—and the one metric that could unravel it all.

In The News Today

An Australian court clarified the reasoning for canceling the visa of unvaccinated tennis star Novak Djokovic, who has since been revealed to own a majority stake in a Danish biotechnology firm researching a treatment for Covid-19. 

Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty of facilitating the abuse of minors by late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, formally requested a retrial over a juror not disclosing his personal experience of sexual abuse during jury selection.

Top Take-Aways

Stocks are off to a rocky start so far this year thanks to a laundry list of challenges including inflation spikes and interest rate hikes. Midterm elections in November are going to make 2022 even trickier by adding yet another layer of uncertainty—which matters to markets more than whoever ends up controlling Congress.

A judge forced the Trump Organization to hire an independent firm to oversee its compliance with subpoenas from the New York State attorney general’s office in its fraud investigation, according to a filing made late Tuesday.

Robinhood cofounders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt are no longer billionaires according to Forbes’ calculations, as shares of their popular stock trading app continue to move lower in recent months and have now lost half their value since the company went public last year.

Morgan Stanley and Bank of America were the latest major banks to report solid earnings on Wednesday. Both firms reported a smaller increase in expenses than rivals like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, where bankers' salaries and bonuses have ballooned.

Interpol arrested 11 individuals associated with a prominent Nigerian cybercrime gang known as SilverTerrier, thought to have targeted as many as 50,000 different individuals and companies in scams impersonating executives to reroute payments.

An explosion of fervor around the buzzy blockchain-based digital collectibles known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has helped marketplace OpenSea to top $4 billion in trading volume this month for the first time ever. A reminder to buyers: NFTs that are created, bought, sold or exchanged are taxed just like art buying, selling or exchanging art.

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Space companies including SpaceX and Sierra Space received nearly $15 billion of private investments in 2021—including a whopping $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter, a record-setting year for a booming industry as investors continue to bet on the “space economy.” 

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