Stock Market Today: 24 Nov 2021

While some stock prices have been beaten-down lately, others are soaring toward historical highs. In this segment of Backstage Pass, recorded on Nov. 15, Fool contributors Jason Hall, Toby Bordelon, and Rachel Warren each pick a stock that they think could be overvalued, but is still a smart buy for long-term investors. Rachel, you brought this one to me and Toby to talk about.

The market rally is promising, but will it deliver? Apple nears a $3 trillion valuation. Trump stock DWAC falls after soaring.

Shares of CVS Health Corp. rose 0.6% in premarket trading Thursday, after the drug store chain and health care services company announced at its Investor Day a $10 billion stock repurchase program, a 10% boost to its dividend and lifted its full-year earnings outlook. The annual dividend rate was raised to $2.20 a share from $2.00 a share, which increases the implied dividend yield at Wednesday’s stock closing price to 2.36% from 2.15%, which compares with the implied yield for the S&P 500 of 1.

More restrictions in Europe as vaccine makers fight Omicron, Apple gets reprieve in antitrust fight with Epic Games, Evergrande downgraded to default by Fitch, and other news to start your day.

(Bloomberg) — U.S. futures fell as concerns about economic risks from restrictions to control the new variant outweighed optimism about the efficacy of vaccines.Most Read from BloombergThe World’s Relentless Demand for Chips Turns Deadly in MalaysiaSand and Soldiers Mix as Troops Move In to Protect Cancun TouristsAnatomy of a Bad RoadThe 15 Best Beers We Drank This YearFormer Oil Trader Is Now Betting on Lumber for SkyscrapersU.S. contracts slipped after the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 extended a ra

People are quitting their jobs at record rates, and businesses could be forced to adapt to meet workers’ demands.

CEO Vasant “Vas” Narasimhan isn’t in a rush to dip into Novartis’ $20 billion cash war chest. “We have the opportunity to be thoughtful,” he says.

HashiCorp Inc. is set to go public Thursday, after the California-based cloud adoption software company’s initial public offering priced overnight well above the expected range. The company raised $1.22 billion as it sold 15.3 million shares in the IPO, which priced at $80 a share, above the expected range of between $68 and $72 a share. The pricing valued the company at about $14.31 billion. The stock is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq some time after the open under the ticker symbol “H

This stock has a growing buy-now-pay-later business, but also many other business segments making it less concentrated.

The new feed will launch next year, and has apparently been in development for months

U.S. markets were heading for a pause Thursday after closing higher the day before on a bout of optimism triggered by some positive news about the efficiency of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine on the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Investors were also looking ahead to data on U.S. jobless claims later on Thursday and U.S. inflation data set to be released on Friday. Meanwhile, European markets increased slightly after Asia had followed the U.S. trend upward, with the noted exception of Japan’s index, down 0.5% while Hong Kong’s rose 1%.

Credit Suisse strategists have boosted their 2022 price target, citing a strong economy and a lack of corporate tax hikes.

Metaverse cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in recent weeks. Is this a good time to start investing in this exciting growth market?

Despite the broad-based S&P 500 enduring 38 double-digit percentage corrections since the beginning of 1950, each and every one of these declines was eventually erased by a bull market rally. For the past two weeks, growth stocks with high valuation premiums have been clobbered. Meta’s bread and butter has always been social-media platform Facebook, and it will probably remain that way for some years to come.

Since the aggregate value of digital currencies bottomed at $141 billion in March 2020, it’s grown more than 15-fold to $2.27 trillion. While the biggest names in crypto, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have provided the biggest nominal boost in market value, it’s the ultra-popular Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB) that’s jaw-dropped investors with its 2021 return. Shiba Inu-themed crypto coins have been a big hit in 2021.

(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. was fined more than 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) in an Italian antitrust probe that accused the retail giant of “harmful” practices and abusing its dominant in one of the largest penalties handed out by a European regulator.Most Read from BloombergThe World’s Relentless Demand for Chips Turns Deadly in MalaysiaSand and Soldiers Mix as Troops Move In to Protect Cancun TouristsAnatomy of a Bad RoadThe 15 Best Beers We Drank This YearFormer Oil Trader Is Now Betti

Career coaches explain how to use your successes in the past year to set yourself up to be more productive, focused, and happier at work in the year ahead.

World stocks stalled at two-week highs on Thursday as increased restrictions in parts of the world to contain the Omicron coronavirus variant tempered optimism following encouraging news on the vaccine front. European stock markets opened higher, but were well off Wednesday’s high, U.S. stock futures were mixed and Japan’s blue-chip Nikkei stock index slipped almost half-a-percent. News on Wednesday from drugmakers Pfizer and BioNTech that a three-shot course of their COVID-19 vaccine was shown to generate a neutralizing effect against the Omicron variant in a laboratory test has cheered investors and lifted the S&P 500 within 1% of a new record high.

Leisure stocks, including bars, restaurants, and hotels were knocked by the news after being badly hit by previous lockdowns and staff shortages.

Amazon Web Services had a major outage on Tuesday. The range of companies affected demonstrates how reliant the world is becoming on just a handful of cloud service providers.