Eli Lilly Expands Radiopharma Push

Every day, we handpick the 5 Top Stories stock market investors need to know. In 5 minutes, you’ll learn the stocks, CEOs, and money managers moving markets.

Eli Lilly Expands Radiopharma Push

Radiopharmaceuticals are a promising new area of cancer treatment. Last year, Eli Lilly [LLY] bought Point Biopharma, a biotech specialising in radiopharma drugs to treat prostate cancer. As the Financial Times reports, the drugmaker has invested $10m into Ionetix, a producer of actinium-225, a key isotope in many radiopharma drugs. Elsewhere, Swiss healthcare firm Roche [RHHBY] is weighing a sale of cancer data specialist Flatiron Health, which it bought in 2018 for $1.9bn.

Is Ripple Fine a Win for Crypto?

Ripple Labs has been ordered to pay a civil penalty of $125m for selling its XRP token to institutional investors. The firm framed this as a victory over the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which had initially sought nearly $2bn in penalties, Bloomberg reported. XRP rose as much as 25% on the news, while bitcoin climbed as much as 4.5% and ether 5%. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Robinhood [HOOD] beat expectations for its Q2 earnings, thanks largely to rising interest in meme stocks and cryptocurrency trading.

AI Winners, AI Losers

On Thursday, Tokyo Electron [TOELY], a provider of semiconductor-patterning systems, beat expectations for Q1 sales and duly raised its profit forecast for the fiscal year to March, citing “investments in mature generation of semiconductors in China”. In Hong Kong, the shares of artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker Black Sesame International [2533:HK], which is backed by Xiaomi [XIACF], fell as much as 35% after its IPO. Intel [INTC] is being sued by shareholders, who say the firm fraudulently concealed problems. Lastly, Microsoft [MSFT] and Palantir [PLTR] are joining forces to sell cloud-computing and AI tools, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, to US government clients, Bloomberg reported.

Pressure Intensifies on Social Media

The Financial Times has detailed how Alphabet’s Google [GOOGL] and Meta [META] made a secret deal to show advertisements for Instagram to teenage users of YouTube. This initiative goes against Google’s own rules that forbid targeting ads to under-18s. Documents seen by the Financial Times suggest efforts were made to disguise the true aims of the campaign. Elsewhere, the UK government’s media regulator Ofcom has published an open letter to social media platforms saying they should not wait for the Online Safety Act to take effect before they address their role in the recent riots.

ARK Tech Spree Can’t Stop Slide

Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF [ARKK] bought shares of tech firms impacted by the recent sell-off, including Amazon [AMZN], Advanced Micro Devices [AMD], and Roku [ROKU]. ARK’s daily tabulations show the purchases happened at the start of the week, during the market rout sparked by fears of an imminent US recession. These moves have not arrested ARKK’s ongoing slide: the ETF closed Wednesday at its lowest levels since November, Bloomberg noted.