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    Nvidia Will Replace Intel in the Dow Jones Stock Index

    The change, starting next Friday, lifts a dominant player in artificial intelligence over its chip-making rival, which has struggled to keep up.The chip-maker Nvidia will soon replace its rival Intel in the Dow Jones industrial average, S&P Dow Jones Indices said on Friday, reflecting Nvidia’s dominance in the world of artificial intelligence.S&P Dow Jones Indices, which maintains the stock index, said in a statement that the change would take place before the opening of trading next Friday “to ensure a more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry.”Nvidia established an early foothold in the A.I. revolution, tailor-making its chips for machine learning tasks and building a community of A.I. programmers who were eager to develop their technology on the company’s hardware. The bet paid off. Nvidia now accounts for the majority of A.I. chip sales and has become the second-most-valuable company in the world, slightly trailing Apple at $3.32 trillion after trading hours on Friday.Intel, which makes the chips that serve as the brains of most computers, once considered buying Nvidia. But its board resisted the acquisition, and Nvidia went on to become a dominant player in the A.I. boom while Intel struggled to keep up. Intel’s market capitalization has fallen below $1 trillion.“The thing that we understood is that this is a reinvention of how computing is done,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive and one of its founders, told The New York Times last year. “And we built everything from the ground up, from the processor all the way up to the end.”A recent stock split at Nvidia prompted speculation that it would replace Intel on the Dow Jones. In June, Nvidia unveiled a 10-for-one stock split that would make it easier for a retail investor to buy into the company without diluting its valuation.Spokeswomen for Nvidia and Intel declined to comment. More

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    When the Stock Market Drops, Stay Calm and Do Nothing

    The markets are in turmoil, but you know what you’re supposed to do now, right? Let’s all take a deep breath, tie our hands behind our backs and say it together: We will not sell stocks in a panic. We will, in fact, do nothing at all right now.Many of the people who are trading today are professional investors of various sorts. Here’s a dirty little secret about, say, hedge funds: All of their trading in reaction to world events doesn’t lead most of them to do better than sticking their money in an index fund that tracks the stock market. Mutual fund managers don’t do much better.So there is no reason to think that you can predict what will happen in the markets in the next few hours or in the near future. It’s better not to try.Remember, much of the money you have in the stock market is probably for retirement anyhow. Chances are, you won’t need it for many years or even decades.But rational thinking often eludes us in moments like this. So here are a few things that may make you feel better.First, look at the performance of your investment portfolio over the last year or three or 10. Chances are, you’ve made a lot of money if you’ve invested regularly and then left things alone. Nice going! Try to think about those enormous gains and not any smaller paper losses from today’s drop.Second, consider the early days of the pandemic, when stocks fell by more than a quarter in the space of a month or so. Who would have thought that within a year, market gains would wipe out those losses and then some? But that’s what happened.Finally, and as ever, you are not the market. You are the sum of many large parts, including home equity and future salary, not to mention the immeasurably high returns that come from friends and family and playing outside and taking in art.Go fly a kite or wander among beautiful buildings and check in with the market again tomorrow. More