Coinbase Drops 12.1% After SEC Files Charges

Stocks drifted on Wall Street Tuesday amid a vacuum of market-moving data. The S&P 500 rose 10.06 points, or 0.2%, to 4,283.85. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 10.42 points, or less than 0.1%, to 33,573.28. The Nasdaq composite rose 46.99 points, or 0.4% to 13,276.42. The S&P 500 is closing in on a gain of 20% from where it was in mid-October. Banks were some of the bigger gainers, recovering from their struggles earlier this year after high interest rates helped cause several high-profile failures, the AP reports.

Some of the day's strongest action was in the cryptocurrency world after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Coinbase with operating its trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker and clearing agency. Shares of its parent, Coinbase Global, tumbled 12.1% after the SEC also accused it of being liable for some of Coinbase’s violations. Other charges focused on Coinbase’s staking-as-a-service program, where users get payments for their crypto almost like earning interest from a traditional bank savings account. A day earlier, the SEC filed 13 charges against another huge crypto trading platform, Binance, and its founder.

On the winning side of Wall Street was Gitlab, which soared 31.2% after the software development platform gave a revenue forecast for the fiscal year that topped analysts' expectations. It also said it expects to turn in a milder loss than Wall Street had forecast, as it benefits from a rush into artificial intelligence.

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This week has few top-tier economic reports and corporate earnings updates to help Wall Street answer its main question. It wants to know which will happen first: a recession, or inflation falling enough to get the Federal Reserve to start cutting interest rates, which have climbed so high they’ve hurt various parts of the economy. That’s why next week looms large. The US government will publish its latest monthly updates on inflation, and the Federal Reserve will meet on interest-rate policy. The bet on Wall Street is that the Fed may hold off on hiking rates, which would be the first time that’s happened in more than a year, but could resume raising rates in July. (More stock market stories.)