5 things to know before the stock market opens Wednesday

• The market’s momentum is back.
• IBM is slashing jobs in marketing and communications.
• An eight-month CNBC investigation offers a rare glimpse into organized retail crime rings.

Here are the most important news items that investors need to start their trading day:

1. Market momentum

Stocks rose Tuesday as investors resumed buying high-flying tech names such as Nvidia (up 7% for the day) and Meta Platforms (up 3%). The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 235.83 points, or 0.61%, while the S&P 500 advanced 1.12% for a new record closing high and the Nasdaq Composite picked up 1.54%. The positive day also came after inflation data was about in line with expectations. It’s “proving difficult to see what may stop the market’s momentum, as earnings, inflation, and interest rates are moving in the right direction,” said Skyler Weinand, chief investment officer at Regan Capital. Follow live market updates here.

2. IBM cuts

IBM is cutting its staff size, the company told employees in its marketing and communications division. IBM Chief Communications Officer Jonathan Adashek led the roughly seven-minute video meeting where the announcement was made, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The news follows IBM CEO Arvind Krishna telling CNBC in December that the company was “massively upskilling all of our employees on AI,” after IBM announced a plan earlier in 2023 to replace nearly 8,000 jobs with AI. In a statement, IBM said it expects “to exit 2024 at roughly the same level of employment as we entered with.”

3. Oh Yeezy

Adidas warned that its North American sales will keep suffering as it continues to sell off its remaining Yeezy inventory. The German shoemaker expects its currency-neutral sales in North America to fall at a mid-single-digit rate in 2024. But it struck a more positive tone overall, saying sales are expected to grow at a mid-single-digit-rare worldwide. Adidas axed its Yeezy brand when it terminated its relationship with rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, after he made a series of antisemitic remarks in 2022. Discontinuing Yeezy represented a drag of about 500 million euros ($546 million) year-over-year compared with 2023. But, selling parts of the remaining inventory in the second and third quarters positively impacted net sales by about 750 million euros.

4. More Boeing, more problems

Some of Boeing‘s top buyers are starting to feel the effects of its latest Max crisis. Southwest Airlines, which only flies Boeing 737s, and other Boeing-heavy airlines Alaska Airlines and United Airlines all said they are impacted by the late-arriving aircraft, causing them to rethink their growth plans for the year. “Boeing needs to become a better company and the deliveries will follow that,” Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said at a JPMorgan industry conference Tuesday. Boeing has struggled to stabilize its supply chain as it deals with increasing quality control issues. It’s also seen a slow increase of output and its new aircraft certification is running years behind schedule.

5. Inside retail crime

CNBC spent about eight months investigating organized retail crime rings, embedding with various law enforcement agencies and getting a rare glimpse into the complex layers of the organizations. Companies have called retail theft an industrywide dilemma, citing crime as the reason for lower profits, the inability to hire and retain staff, and the degradation of the in-store experience. In some incidents, the thefts CNBC witnessed were low-level shoplifting incidents involving people who appeared to be homeless or mentally ill. But in other cases, CNBC saw takedowns of alleged organized theft groups that police said were reselling stolen merchandise at flea markets. One group was in operation for more than a decade and made millions reselling stolen cosmetics on Amazon, police said.

— CNBC’s Brian Evans, Jeff Cox, Hayden Field, Elliot Smith Leslie Josephs, Gabrielle Fonrouge, Scott Zamost and Courtney Reagan contributed to this report.

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