Wall Street Today | Dip buyers winning with $2.3 billion of leveraged tech bets

Asia stocks look set to open steady after a U.S. inflation print left intact expectations for interest-rate increases already priced into the market. The dollar sank.

The dip-buying army has braved a brutal start to the year to lavish billions on a high-octane bet that the tech wreck is no more.

US natural gas futures surged more than 14% on Wednesday as temperatures drop and forecasts call for more winter weather ahead.

"The heating demand outlook for [the] eastern-third of the U.S. has strengthened materially for this weekend and for the last week of January," said Again Capital's John Kilduff, noting that this Saturday could see record natural gas demand due to a cold blast forecast for Friday.

U.S. consumer prices are likely to extend their eye-popping gains after soaring last year by the most in nearly four decades, further burdening Americans and ramping up pressure on policy makers to act.

If signs fail to materialize that inflation is moderating, Federal Reserve policy makers could be forced to embark on a steeper path of interest-rate hikes and balance-sheet shrinkage.

Online shopping for holiday gifts last year in the U.S. grew at the slowest rate since at least 2014, according to Adobe Analytics, after a blowout year in 2020.

Consumers spent a record $204.5 billion on e-commerce from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, an 8.6% increase from the prior-year period, Adobe said. Growth slowed from prior years amid decreased popularity of major shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, fewer discounts on key gift categories, and the emergence of the omicron variant that sickened workers and upended some holiday gatherings.

In the past 12 months, ETF issuers have seized on everything from Bitcoin futures, to blockchain, to NFTs and more to tap into the DeFi boom. It was only a matter of time before they got to Web3.

Real estate in virtual worlds — sometimes called the metaverse — is going for millions of dollars in some cases.

The most expensive spots are near where lots of users congregate — for instance, someone recently paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in a virtual world called the Sandbox. But even proponents are warning would-be investors that this is risky business.

Tesla co-founder JB Straubel says industry sales estimates predicting EVs will account for 12.7% of all U.S. auto sales by 2025 may be too low. EV battery-recycling company Redwood Materials is spending $1 billion to build a new plant in McCarran, Nev.

The facility will produce anode copper foil that will ultimately go into battery packs manufactured at the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada.