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You can add Amazon to the list of companies benefiting from the rising effectiveness of AI.
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Billionaire investor Jim Simons, a mathematician who founded one of the most profitable trading firms of all time and pioneered the field of quantitative investing, has died at the age of 86.
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Buy expensive stocks - or build a whole portfolio - on the cheap. Fractional shares, increasingly available at online brokers including Schwab, Fidelity and Robinhood, allow you to buy a portion of a stock you might not otherwise be able to afford. You can even put together a portfolio of stock snippets, giving you a diversified ownership stake in the best of corporate America, even if you're just starting out and your budget is limited.
SEE MORE 11 Stock Picks That Billionaires Love
Say you had $1,000 to invest and wanted to buy stock in NVR (NVR), a homebuilder recently rated Strong Buy by investment research firm CFRA. You'd be out of luck, considering the shares recently traded for about $4,200 a pop. But at Schwab, for example, you'd be able to buy what the company calls a Stock Slice - a single slice or up to 30 slices at a time of any S&P 500 stock for as little as $5 per slice, commission-free. With Fidelity's Stocks by the Slice program, you can access more than 7,000 U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for as little as $1.
You can also trade fractional shares at Robinhood and InteractiveBrokers, each with programs starting at $1. Eligible stocks and ETFs at Robinhood trade for more than $1 per share and have a market value of more than $25 million. InteractiveBrokers allows trading in U.S. and European stocks and ETFs. Vanguard is testing fractional trading of Vanguard ETFs for launch later this year. The rules and eligible investments for fractional share-buying differ by broker, so be sure to compare options.
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It was a choppy start to the short trading week, with stocks spending time in both positive and negative territory Tuesday. Bears gained the upper hand in the afternoon, though, with the three major indexes ending another day in the red.
SEE MORE The ESG Investing Backlash
Although this week's economic calendar is fairly thin, data from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) this morning showed that activity in the services sector ticked up to 56.9% in August - the highest level since April - from July's 56.7%.
"This is the most recent piece of data to suggest the economy remains resilient and as such the market takeaway is that this gives the Fed more room to continue raising rates," says Michael Reinking, senior market strategist for the New York Stock Exchange. "Futures markets are now pricing in a 75% chance of a 75 basis-point hike later this month from a coin flip late last week." A basis point is one-one hundredth of a percentage point.
In reaction to today's ISM data, the 10-year Treasury yield rose to its loftiest level since mid-June. This, in turn, weighed on shares in the communication services (-1.3%) and technology (-0.6%) sectors, with names such as streaming giant Netflix (NFLX, -3.4%) and chipmaker Intel (INTC, -2.8%) seeing notable declines.
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As for the major indexes, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.7% to 11,544, its seventh straight loss.
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