Apple and Amazon Events Buoy Markets As Bitcoin Surges Past $11K

The week’s off to a good start as stocks closed at a six-week high. Investors are bullish on the prospects of quarterly earning reports from tech giants Apple and Amazon. 

Nasdaq rose more than 2%, led by Amazon, whose shares jumped 4.5% in anticipation of the company’s annual Prime Day event, which typically brings in an influx of online shoppers eager to snap up promotions. 

Apple saw its shares gain more than 6% as market watchers give the tech company a bullish bill of health ahead of its iPhone 12 launch event today.

Elsewhere, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are expected to continue talks about a stimulus deal, but markets are waiting them out till after the election. 

But other companies aren’t feeling so cheery about earnings season. “Companies are expected to report a steep decline in profits as Covid continues to bite,” says a spokesperson from AAX, the world’s first digital asset exchange powered by the London Stock Exchange

Economists are expected drops as high as 20% over last year, according to FactSet data.

Bitcoin's sudden boom

In crypto land meanwhile, Bitcoin surged past $11,000, settling above $11,400 at the time of writing. 

Across crypto, things are in the green. Market cap across the industry has grown $26 billion in the last week, with Bitcoin—the largest cryptocurrency by market cap—gaining 8% to its price in seven days. 

It’s unsurprising to learn that over $6.7 billion of Bitcoin is now held by public companies, including US software giant MicroStrategy; asset manager Galaxy Digital, and Jack Dorsey’s payment processing platform, Square.

Currently, with 38,250 BTC ($425 million), Microstrategy holds more Bitcoin than any other publicly traded investor, aside from Grayscale.

Microstrategy’s holdings also mean that the company’s shareholders—who include BlackRock, Vanguard, and Norway's Oil Fund—are now indirectly exposed to millions in Bitcoin.

Lastly, not leastly, Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain platform founded by zero-knowledge proof inventor Silvio Micali, boasts a team of advisors that includes MIT economics researchers, game theory experts, several Turing Award winners, and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant. 

Now, it can add a Nobel Laureate to the mix.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Algorand advisor Paul Milgrom. Together with his Stanford colleague and co-awardee Robert Wilson, Milgrom designed new types of auctions for markets that don’t typically lend themselves to auctions, such as radio frequencies.

While Algorand's price did little in response to the good news, it's the icing on the cake for crypto's recent purple patch.