By Heard editors
What Happened in Markets Today
Stocks slip ahead of the holiday weekend. U.S. stocks closed mostly lower Friday ahead of the three-day weekend. The Dow was off by 83 points while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite each declined by about 0.1%. That left all three indexes in the red for the full week.
Trump's Fed pick still in play. President Trump signaled Friday that he may keep National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett in his current job, instead of nominating him to be the next Federal Reserve chair. That increased speculation that former Fed governor Kevin Warsh will be Trump's pick for the central bank's top job.
OpenAI dings Google's $4 trillion shine. Shares of Google-parent Alphabet slipped nearly 1% on Friday, falling below the $4 trillion market cap milestone that it passed at the start of the week. OpenAI announced plans during the day to start testing ads within its popular ChatGPT chatbot in the coming weeks, potentially setting up a new competitive threat to Google's core business.
AI disruption fears return to software. Major cloud software stocks Salesforce, Adobe, Workday and ServiceNow slipped around 3% on Friday. That added to losses that have piled up all week since Anthropic released a new coding tool named Cowork, which seems to have reignited fears about AI disrupting established software businesses. The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index dropped more than 7% this week.
This analysis comes from the Journal's Heard on the Street team. Subscribe to their free daily afternoon newsletter here.
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 16, 2026 16:52 ET (21:52 GMT)
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