Here are the most important news items that investors need to start their trading day:
1. Mixed up
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite both rose Tuesday, but the Dow wasn't so lucky. The S&P 500 increased 0.17% to 5,078.18, while the Nasdaq climbed 0.37% to 16,035.30. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, slipped 0.25% to close at 38,972.41. Traders are looking ahead to the release of the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation on Thursday. That data, the personal consumption expenditure price index, should give insights into the health of the economy, as well as the path of monetary policy. Follow live market updates.
2. Stopped talking
Warner Bros. Discovery halted talks with Paramount Global about a potential acquisition that would have merged the media giants, CNBC's Alex Sherman reported Tuesday. The companies had preliminary talks of a merger last year but discussions cooled off this month. Paramount, which has set up a special committee to sift through bids for the company, has received offers from media mogul Byron Allen and interest from David Ellison's Skydance Media. Comcast, which has been exploring a commercial partnership with Paramount, is not interested in acquiring Paramount Global's assets, a source told CNBC.
3. Slowing down
Apple will wind down its team working to build an electric car to rival Tesla, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The team, called Special Projects Group, employed thousands of employees but differed from the tech giant's main business of electronics and online services. Reports of the program first surfaced in 2014 and there was little public information about Apple's plans.
4. Please dismiss
OpenAI asked a judge to throw out parts of a lawsuit filed last year by the New York Times that accused the ChatGPT operator of copyright infringement and abusing the newspaper's intellectual property. OpenAI said in a Monday filing that the Times "paid someone to hack OpenAI's products" to create examples of copyright infringement for its case. OpenAI said the Times used deceptive prompts that violate the company's policy and alleged it took "tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results." The alleged hacking could also be called prompt engineering or "red-teaming," a frequent way to alert companies of system vulnerabilities.
5. Cruising on
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings had its first profitable year since 2019, the company reported in its fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday. Shares of the company soared about 20% on the report that also showed slightly better-than-expected revenue of $1.99 billion and a worse-than-expected loss per share of 18 cents for the quarter ending in December. The company forecast an adjusted profit of about $635 million for the full year in 2024. Carnival Corp. and Royal Caribbean Cruises were also up on Tuesday.
— CNBC's Alex Harring, Hakyung Kim, Alex Sherman, Hayden Field, MacKenzie Sigalos, Kif Leswing and Laya Neelakandan contributed to this report.
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