Bitcoin is more closely correlated to the Nasdaq than it is to gold most of the time, and investors could benefit from viewing it as another big tech stock, says Standard Chartered.

Bitcoin’s correlation with the Nasdaq is currently at about 0.5, after it approached 0.8 earlier this year, according to the bank. Meanwhile, its correlation with gold has been falling since January, touching zero at one point, and is now just above 0.2.

“Bitcoin trading is highly correlated to the Nasdaq over short time horizons,” Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, said in a note Monday. “This Nasdaq correlation leads to the idea that bitcoin could be included in a basket of large tech stocks; if it were included, the implication would be more institutional buying as BTC would serve multiple purposes in investor portfolios.”

Bitcoin is frequently viewed as “digital gold” and a hedge against risks facing the traditional financial sector. Kendrick said he still sees the flagship cryptocurrency serving that purpose but that “in reality … the need for such hedges is very infrequent.”

Standard Chartered created a hypothetical index dubbed “Mag 7B,” in which it added bitcoin to the Magnificent 7 tech stocks — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla — and removed Tesla.

“Mag 7B has outperformed Mag 7 by about 5% over the period since December 2017,” he said. “On a calendar year basis, Mag 7B outperformed Mag 7 in five out of seven years, albeit by a very small margin in 2022. Mag 7B’s relative returns are decent on both an absolute basis (averaging around 1% a year above Mag 7) and a calendar-year basis.”

Kendrick said bitcoin has been trading in a similar volatility-adjusted fashion to Nvidia since President Trump’s inauguration. They’re down 16% and 12%, respectively, since Jan. 20. Meanwhile, Tesla, which has lost 36% in the same period, is trading more like ether (down 38% since Jan. 20).

“Investors can view bitcoin as both a hedge against [traditional finance] and as part of their tech allocation,” Kendrick said. “Indeed, as BTC’s role in global investor portfolios becomes established, we think that having more than one use will bring fresh capital inflows to the asset. This is particularly true as bitcoin investment becomes more institutionalized.”

Bitcoin is down about 5% for the year after Trump’s tariff threats in recent weeks have brought new volatility to the market. Investors are expecting relief in the second quarter, however, given bitcoin’s two of its most persistent correlations: its positive correlation with money supply growth, also known as M2, and its negative correlation with the U.S. dollar index, or DXY.

—CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed reporting.

Embattled genetic testing company 23andMe, once valued at $6 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Missouri federal court on Sunday night.

The company’s CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has resigned from her role as chief executive effective immediately, though she will remain a member of the board. Joseph Selsavage, 23andMe’s chief financial and accounting officer, will serve as interim CEO, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

“We have had many successes but I equally take accountability for the challenges we have today,” Wojcicki wrote in a post on X early Monday morning. “There is no doubt that the challenges faced by 23andMe through an evolving business model have been real, but my belief in the company and its future is unwavering.”

23andMe declined to comment further on the filing.

Anne Wojcicki speaks at the South by Southwest festival in 2023. Jordan Vonderhaar / Bloomberg via Getty Images file

The former billionaire co-founded 23andMe in 2006, and the company rocketed into the mainstream because of its at-home DNA testing kits that gave customers insight into their family histories and genetic profiles. The five-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company went public in 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, which valued the company at around $3.5 billion at the time.

23andMe’s stock has mostly been in free fall in recent years as the company struggled to generate recurring revenue and stand up viable research and therapeutics businesses. As of Monday morning, the company has a market capitalization of around $25 million.

23andMe in Mountain View, Calif.Smith Collection / Getty Images

Last March, 23andMe’s independent directors formed a special committee to evaluate the company’s potential paths forward. Wojcicki submitted multiple proposals to take the company private, but all were rejected. The special committee “unanimously determined to reject” Wojcicki’s most recent proposal earlier this month.

If 23andMe’s plan to sell its assets through a Chapter 11 plan is approved by the court, the company will “actively solicit qualified bids” over a 45-day process. Wojcicki plans to pursue the company as an independent bidder, she said in her post on Monday.

23andMe has between $100 million and $500 million in estimated assets, as well as between $100 million and $500 million in estimated liabilities, according to the bankruptcy filing.

Beyond its financial woes, privacy concerns around 23andMe’s genetic database have swirled in recent years. In October 2023, hackers accessed the information of nearly 7 million customers. 

California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Friday issued a consumer alert urging residents to consider deleting their genetic data from 23andMe’s website.

23andMe said there will be no changes to the way that it stores, protects or manages customer data through the sale process, and it will continue operating business as usual.

“As I think about the future, I will continue to tirelessly advocate for customers to have choice and transparency with respect to their personal data, regardless of platform,” Wojcicki said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday walked back comments he made in January, when he cast doubt on whether useful quantum computers would hit the market in the next 15 years.

At Nvidia’s “Quantum Day” event, part of the company’s annual GTC Conference, Huang admitted that his comments came out wrong.

“This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong,” Huang said.

In January, Huang sent quantum computing stocks reeling when he said 15 years was “on the early side” in considering how long it would be before the technology would be useful. He said at the time that 20 years was a timeframe that “a whole bunch of us would believe.”

In his opening comments on Thursday, Huang drew comparisons between pre-revenue quantum companies and Nvidia’s early days. He said it took over 20 years for Nvidia to build out its software and hardware business.

He also expressed surprise that his comments were able to move markets, and joked he didn’t know that certain quantum computing companies were publicly traded.

“How could a quantum computer company be public?” Huang said.

The event included panels with representatives from 12 quantum companies and startups. It represents a truce of sorts between Nvidia, which makes more traditional computers, and the quantum computing industry. Several quantum execs fired back at Nvidia after Huang’s earlier comments.

A third panel included representatives from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, which are also investing in quantum technology and are among Nvidia’s most important customers.

Nvidia has another reason to embrace quantum. As quantum computers are being built, much of the research on them is done through simulators on powerful computers, like those that Nvidia sells.

It’s also possible that a quantum computer would require a traditional computer to operate it. Nvidia is working to provide the technology and software to integrate graphics processing units (GPUs) and quantum chips.

“Of course, quantum computing has the potential and all of our hopes that it will deliver extraordinary impact,” Huang said on Thursday. “But the technology is insanely complicated.”

Nvidia said this week that it will build a research center in Boston to allow quantum companies to collaborate with researchers at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The center will include several racks of the company’s Blackwell AI servers.

Quantum computing has been a dream of physicists and mathematicians since the 1980s, when California Institute of Technology professor Richard Feynman first proposed the idea behind a quantum computer.

While classical computers use bits that are either 0 or 1, the bits inside a quantum computer — qubits — end up being on or off based on probability. Experts predict that the technology will be able to solve problems with massive amounts of possible solutions, such as deciphering codes, routing deliveries or simulating chemistry or weather.

No quantum computer has yet beat a computer at solving a real, useful problem. But Google claimed late last year that it discovered a way to do error correction.

One question at the panel centered around whether quantum computing might one day threaten companies like Nvidia that make computers based on transistors.

“A long time ago, somebody asked me, ‘So what’s accelerated computing good for?’” Huang said at the panel. Accelerated computing is a phrase he uses to refer to the kind of GPU computers that Nvidia makes.

“I said, a long time ago, because I was wrong, this is going to replace computers,” he said. “This is going to be the way computing is done, and and everything, everything is going to be better. And it turned out I was wrong.”

Investors have closely watched Nvidia’s week-long GPU Technology Conference (GTC) for news and updates from the dominant maker of chips that power artificial intelligence applications.

The event comes at a pivotal time for Nvidia shares. After two years of monster gains, the stock is down 15% over the past month and 22% below the January all-time high.

As part of the event, CEO Jensen Huang took questions from analysts on topics ranging from demand for its advanced Blackwell chips to the impact of Trump administration tariffs. Here’s a breakdown of how Huang responded — and what analysts homed in on — during some of the most important questions:

Huang said he “underrepresented” demand in a slide that showed 3.6 million in estimated Blackwell shipments to the top four cloud service providers this year. While Huang acknowledged speculation regarding shrinking demand, he said the amount of computation needed for AI has “exploded” and that the four biggest cloud service clients remain “fully invested.”

Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore noted that Huang’s commentary on Blackwell demand in data centers was the first-ever such disclosure.

“It was clear that the reason the company made the decision to give that data was to refocus the narrative on the strength of the demand profile, as they continue to field questions related to Open AI related spending shifting from 1 of the 4 to another of the 4, or the pressure of ASICs, which come from these 4 customers,” Moore wrote to clients, referring to application-specific integrated circuits.

Piper Sandler analyst Harsh Kumar said the slide was “only scratching the surface” on demand. Beyond the four largest customers, he said others are also likely “all in line looking to get their hands on as much compute as their budgets allow.”

Another takeaway for Moore was the growth in physical AI, which refers to the use of the technology to power machines’ actions in the real world as opposed to within software.

At previous GTCs, Moore said physical AI “felt a little bit like speculative fiction.” But this year, “we are now hearing developers wrestling with tangible problems in the physical realm.”

Truist analyst William Stein, meanwhile, described physical AI as something that’s “starting to materialize.” The next wave for physical AI centers around robotics, he said, and presents a potential $50 trillion market for Nvidia.

Stein highliughted Jensen’s demonstration of Isaac GR00T N1, a customizable foundation model for humanoid robots.

Several analysts highlighted Huang’s explanation of what tariffs mean for Nvidia’s business.

“Management noted they have been preparing for such scenarios and are beginning to manufacture more onshore,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said. “It was mentioned that Nvidia is already utilizing [Taiwan Semiconductor’s’] Arizona fab where it is manufacturing production silicon.”

Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said Huang’s answer made it seem like Nvidia’s push to relocate some manufacturing to the U.S. would limit the effect of higher tariffs.

Rasgon also noted that Huang brushed off concerns of a recession hurting customer spending. Huang argued that companies would first cut spending in the areas of their business that aren’t growing, Rasgon said.

Klarna, the buy now, pay later lender that’s headed for an initial public offering, said on Thursday that it’s signed on DoorDash as a partner, another sign of momentum for public market investors.

It’s DoorDash’s first BNPL alliance and gives users of the restaurant delivery service a new way to pay for meals. Klarna said in a press release that DoorDash customers will be able to pay in full at checkout, split payments into four equal interest-free installments, or defer to dates that align conveniently with payday schedules.

Klarna, which is headquartered in Sweden, filed its prospectus last week to list on the New York Stock Exchange. Revenue last year increased 24% to $2.8 billion, and adjusted operating profit was $181 million, swinging from a loss of $49 million a year earlier. CNBC reported on Monday that Klarna will be the exclusive provider of buy now, pay later loans for Walmart, taking a coveted partnership away from rival Affirm.

“Our partnership with DoorDash marks an important milestone in Klarna’s expansion into everyday spending categories,” said David Sykes, Klarna’s chief commercial officer, in Thursday’s release.

Klarna, founded in 2005, said in its prospectus that it has 675,000 merchant partners in 26 countries. It’s among the most hotly anticipated IPOs of the year following an extended stretch of historically little activity for new offerings.

As women’s sports surge in popularity, professional leagues are increasingly touting the value of female athletes. New professional leagues like SailGP are launching with the advantage of building from the ground up, with gender diversity as part of their DNA.

Noncontact and noncollision sports are leading the way. Formula 1′s F1 Academy has created a pipeline for women into motorsports, with a goal of increasing female participation and representation on and off the racetrack. At the same time, it’s drawing a more diverse fanbase. Roughly 41% of F1 fans now are female, with women aged 16 to 24 years old making up the fastest-growing fan group, according to Nielsen Sports.

Professional male and female athletes are already competing alongside and against each other in the United Pickleball Association’s unified league, the Global Mixed Gender Basketball league and in SailGP, the international sailing league co-founded by Oracle founder Larry Ellison and champion yachtsman Russell Coutts. 

Founded in 2018, the upstart sailing league involves 12 international teams racing on high-speed, 50-foot catamarans known as F50s. At speeds of more than 60 mph, SailGP is gaining a reputation as a sort of Formula 1 on the water.

“The whole goal is to train athletes to be capable of racing on an F50, which is one of the more complex boats in the world — maybe the most difficult boat to race in the world right now,” said Coutts, who is also SailGP’s chief executive officer. 

The league didn’t set out with gender equity goals in mind, Coutts said, but simply sought to create the most compelling competition.  

“We believe that male and female athletes can compete at the top of our sport against each other and with each other, so when we we saw that there was a difference in participation levels — and didn’t really see any logical reason for that — we took some steps to address that and we’ll take further steps in the future,” said Coutts. 

To bridge the experience gap most female sailors face, SailGP created programs to draw and train talent. In December, its Women’s Performance Camp in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, marked its largest on-the-water women’s athlete training camp to date. 

The league also requires each team to have at least one female athlete onboard during races and has set targets to have at least two female athletes per race crew in key positions within the next five years. Those key positions are the driver, who steers the boat; the strategist, who advises on tactics; the wing trimmer, who adjusts the 85- to 90-foot carbon-fiber wing sail; and the flight controller, who dictates how high or low the boat flies over the water.

The next SailGP races take place Saturday and Sunday in San Francisco, the second in back-to-back U.S. weekend races. 

SailGP has embedded inclusivity and sustainability into the competition via an Impact League that runs parallel to the on-the-water championship. Teams earn points for taking action to make sailing more accessible and to protect the environment in order to reach the podium. Winning teams earn cash prize donations to their partners. The Canadian team is in the lead in the Impact League thanks to its work to offer training opportunities, sailing camps and demo days to introduce foiling to new Canadian athletes.

“That changes the mindframe of very competitive people to care, and to compete, in a world of impact and sustainability as well,” said SailGP Chief Marketing Officer Leah Davis. “When you challenge the world’s most competitive people to be good at something else, they will turn their eyes to that pretty quickly, and in a pretty impactful way.”

Off the water, 43% of SailGP’s C-suite is female, up from just 14% in 2021. For comparison, 29% of C-suite roles at Fortune 500 companies are held by women, according to McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2024 report. The league last year introduced Apex Group’s accelerator program, aimed at increasing female representation at senior levels of the company. 

It has also introduced initiatives to train more women on the operations, technology and boat-building side of the business. For example, SailGP Technologies based in Southampton, U.K., offers an apprenticeship training scheme — eight participants join the program each year, four male and four female. Today, 33% of directors at SailGP and 52% of heads of departments are female.

The overall business strategy is helping to grow the league’s appeal to a new set of fans. For the first time in its history, more than half of the ticket holders in attendance at last season’s New Zealand Championships in March were female, a trend that has held steady this season.

“This demographic has been underserved in sports,” said SailGP Chief Purpose Officer Fiona Morgan. “A huge part of our headroom in fans is young fans — and actually they’re female fans — who probably didn’t think about sailing, but they like extreme sports or sustainability, or they like sports that have gender equity at the heart.”

In June, Tommy Hilfiger was announced as the United States SailGP team’s official lifestyle apparel partner, joining brands such as Red Bull, Emirates, Mubadala, Rockwool and Deutsche Bank in sponsoring individual teams. In November, SailGP announced it had signed Rolex as its first title sponsor.

“I don’t think many brands nowadays will go into sponsorship that doesn’t have diversity or equity at some point in it,” said Morgan. “Their consumers and their investors will ensure they do that.” 

In September, the league achieved a major milestone, announcing its first female driver. Two-time Olympic sailing champion Martine Grael joined for the 2024-25 season to skipper the new Mubadala Brazil SailGP Team, making history and immediately climbing the leaderboard. 

After championships in Dubai, Auckland, New Zealand, Sydney and Los Angeles, teams from the UK, Australia and New Zealand are leading the league. Grael has steered her team ahead of the Germany SailGP team, and is proving competitive against the more experienced United States team.

“In the past — and still nowadays — you see a lot of people say, ‘Girls shouldn’t do that,’” Grael said. Her response is to call out that old way of thinking: “Shouldn’t do what?”

Grael credits much of her early success to familiarizing herself with the boats using SailGP’s simulator, developing muscle memory before even getting on the water. Unlike traditional boats built with male sailors in mind, SailGP’s modern foiling boats open opportunities for women in roles that do not require as much physical strength, she said. Knowing when to push a button and developing a good feel for the boat are equally important to the more physical functions, said Grael. 

“Some guys have failed to understand that a girl is very much capable of doing the same role they’re doing,” she said.

Grael is among a number of top female athletes competing in key positions in SailGP — including Emirates Great Britain Team’s strategist Hannah Mills and the U.S. team’s Anna Weis — and says though women are still in the minority, things are changing.

Together with women competing in marquee races — like Switzerland’s Justine Mettraux, who took eighth place in the Vendée Globe single-handed, nonstop, nonassisted round-the-world race this year — they are carving a path for a new cohort of women to gain opportunities and make their mark.

“We have been less limited — I grew up never being told I shouldn’t do something,” said Grael. “There’s a big generation of others looking at us, and they’re going to come out strong.”

A federal appeals court ruled that art created autonomously by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted, saying that at least initial human authorship is required for a copyright.

The ruling Tuesday upheld a decision by the U.S. Copyright Office denying computer scientist Stephen Thaler a copyright for the painting “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.”

The picture was created by Thaler’s AI platform, the “Creativity Machine.”

The “Copyright Office’s longstanding rule requiring a human author … does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence,” a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said in its unanimous ruling.

“The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being — the person who created, operated, or use artificial intelligence — and not the machine itself,” the panel said.

The panel noted that the Copyright Office “has allowed the registration of works made by human authors who use artificial intelligence.”

Copyright grants intellectual property protection to original works, giving their owners exclusive rights to reproduce the works, sell the works, rent them and display them.

Tuesday’s ruling hinged on the fact that Thaler listed the “Creativity Machine” as the sole “author” of “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” when he submitted a registration application to the Copyright Office in 2018.

Thaler listed himself as the picture’s owner in the application.

Thaler told CNBC in an interview that the Creativity Machine created the painting “on its own” in 2012.

The machine “learned cumulatively, and I was the parent, and I was basically tutoring it,” Thaler said.

“It actually generated [the painting] on its own as it mediated,” said Thaler.

He said his AI machines are “sentients” and “self-determining.”

Thaler’s lawyer, Ryan Abbott, told CNBC in an interview said, “We do strongly disagree with the appeals court decision and plan to appeal it.”

Abbott said he would first ask the full judicial lineup of the Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case. If that appeal is unsuccessful, Abbott could ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the issue.

The attorney said the case detailed “the first publicized rejection” by the Copyright Office “on the basis” of the claim that a work was created by AI.

That denial and the subsequent court rulings in the office’s favor, “creates a huge shadow on the creative community” he said, because “it’s not clear where the line is” delineating when a work created by or with the help of AI will be denied a copyright.

Despite the ruling, Abbott said he “was very pleased to see that the case has been successful in drawing public attention to these very important public policy issues.”

The Copyright Office first denied Thaler’s application in August 2019, saying, “We cannot register this work because it lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.”

“According to your application this work was ’created autonomously by machine,” the office said at the time.

The office cited an 1884 ruling by the Supreme Court, which found that Congress had the right to extend copyright protection to a photograph, in that case one taken of the author Oscar Wilde.

The office later rejected two requests by Thaler for reconsideration of its decision.

After the second denial, in 2022, Thaler sued the office in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeking to reverse the decision.

District Court Judge Beryl Howell in August 2023 ruled in favor of the Copyright Office, writing, “Defendants are correct that human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim.”

“Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright,” Howell wrote.

Thaler then appealed Howell’s ruling to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In its decision Tuesday, the appeals panel wrote, “This case presents a question made salient by recent advances in artificial intelligence: Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976?”

“The use of artificial intelligence to produce original work is rapidly increasing across industries and creative fields,” the decision noted.

“Who — or what — the ‘author’ of such work is a question that implicates important property rights undergirding growth and creative innovation.”

The ruling noted that Thaler had argued that the Copyright Office’s human authorship requirement “is unconstitutional and unsupported by either statute or case law.”

Thaler also “claimed that judicial opinions ‘from the Gilded Age’ could not settle the question of whether computer generated works are copyrightable today,” the ruling noted.

But the appeals panel said that “authors are at the center of the Copyright Act,” and that “traditional tools of statutory interpretation show that within the meaning of the Copyright Act, ‘author’ refers only to human beings.”

The panel said that the Copyright Office “formally adopted the human authorship requirement in 1973.”

That was six years after the office noted in its annual report to Congress that, “as computer technology develops and becomes more sophisticated, difficult questions of authorship are emerging.”

Abbott, the attorney who represented Thaler in the appeal, told CNBC that the Copyright Act “never says” that “you need a human author at all for a work … or a named author.”

Abbott noted that corporations are granted copyrights, as are authors who are anonymous or pseudonymous.

Protecting a ‘beautiful picture’

The Copyright Office, in a statement to CNBC, said it “believes the court reached the correct result, affirming the Office’s registration decision and confirming that human authorship is required for copyright.”

Thaler said that he will continue to pursue his bid for a copyright for the painting.

“My personal goal is not to preserve the feeling of machines,” Thaler said. “It’s more to preserve, how should I say, orphaned intellectual property.”

“A machine creates a beautiful picture? There should be some protection for it,” Thaler said.

Darden Restaurants on Thursday reported weaker-than-expected sales as Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse underperformed analysts’ projections.

Shares of the company were up in premarket trading.

Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Darden reported fiscal third-quarter net income of $323.4 million, or $2.74 per share, up from $312.9 million, or $2.60 per share, a year earlier.

Excluding costs related to its acquisition of Chuy’s, Darden earned $2.80 per share.

Net sales rose 6.2% to $3.16 billion, fueled largely by the addition of Chuy’s restaurants to its portfolio.

Darden’s same-store sales rose 0.7%, less than the 1.7% increase expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount estimates.

Both Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse, which are typically the two standouts of Darden’s portfolio, reported underwhelming same-store sales growth. Olive Garden’s same-store sales rose 0.6%. Analysts were anticipating same-store sales growth of 1.5%. And LongHorn’s same-store sales increased 2.6%, missing analysts’ expectations of 5% growth.

Darden’s fine dining segment, which includes The Capital Grille and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, reported same-store sales declines of 0.8%.

The last segment of Darden’s business, which includes Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen and Yard House, saw same-store sales shrink 0.4% in the quarter.

For the full year, Darden reiterated its forecast for revenue of $12.1 billion. It narrowed its outlook for adjusted earnings from continuing operations to a range of $9.45 to $9.52 per share. Its prior forecast was $9.40 to $9.60 per share.

Darden’s fiscal 2025 outlook includes Chuy’s results, but the Tex-Mex chain won’t be included in its same-store sales metrics until the fiscal fourth quarter in 2026.