What market trends were observed on January 30, 2026?
Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Friday, January 30th. In today's episode, we'll tell you who Trump nominated to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. We'll also recap earnings from Apple and tell you about OpenAI's plans to IPO.
Then stick around to the end of the show to learn about Elon Musk's plans to merge all of his companies. We got a great show for you today. Let's go.
Markets went on a wild ride yesterday, bouncing off the lows, but still closing in the red. The S&P 500 was down as much as 1.5% before clawing its way back to close down just 0.1%. The NASDAQ was down over 2% at its lows, but recovered to finish down 0.7%. Now, the tech sector was the worst performing yesterday because of a big sell-off in Microsoft.
Microsoft stock tanked 10% yesterday, which is huge for a company this size. In fact, Microsoft lost over $350 billion in market cap, which is the single biggest one-day decline in history. The biggest loss still belongs to NVIDIA, which lost nearly $600 billion almost exactly a year ago after DeepSeek shocked everyone. You guys remember DeepSeek? That was a crazy day.
But yeah, investors are freaking out again because Microsoft reported slower cloud growth despite spending billions of dollars on AI. If you want a full recap of Microsoft's earnings, go check out yesterday's episode. We also covered Tesla and Meta's earnings yesterday as well. Now we got to talk about gold and silver again. After hitting record highs, the prices are now crashing a bit.
Gold went from $5,600 an ounce yesterday down to about $5,000 this morning. Silver was up over $120 an ounce yesterday, but it's now below $100 today. These metals continue to trade like cryptocurrencies. It's absolutely wild. By the way, speaking of crypto, Bitcoin keeps dropping. It was down 5% yesterday, and it's now trading at $82,000, which is the lowest level since April of last year.
So yeah, I'm not sure when Bitcoin's going to get its mojo back. Now, the big news rocking the markets today is that President Trump has officially nominated Kevin Warsh to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Trump posted this morning about it on Truth Social. Now, this is a very interesting pick because Kevin Warsh is a former Fed governor. He served on the Fed board from 2006 to 2011.
So he's not a total outsider. It's kind of a safe pick. And what's interesting is that Kevin Warsh has historically been hawkish on inflation, meaning that he's been less enthusiastic to cut interest rates because he's concerned that inflation might take back up. But lately, he's changed his tone and he's echoed President Trump's criticism that the Fed has been too slow to cut interest rates.
So there's kind of a mixed signal coming from Kevin Warsh right now. Now, he still needs to get confirmed by the Senate. But when and if he does, he'll take over as Fed chair in May, replacing Jerome Powell. So yeah, it was a very busy week, a lot going on, and earnings season keeps rolling on next week. We're getting results from Google, Amazon, AMD, Eli Lilly, and more.
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