The rally in investments tied to Donald Trump's US presidential election win has continued to dominate markets.
Shares in cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase surged to their highest point in nearly three years on Monday, closing up nearly 20% at $324.24 (￡252.93) per share.
This has been fuelled by the rise in bitcoin (BTC-USD), which has continued to reach fresh highs, nearing the $90,000 mark in early trading on Tuesday.
Investors have also continued to pile into electric carmaker Tesla as another post-election "Trump trade", following CEO Elon Musk's support for Trump's campaign.
Tesla shares closed Monday's session up nearly 9% and were up 2% in pre-market trading on Tuesday morning.
The jump in shares over the past week has taken the company's market valuation above the $1tn mark.
In a note on Monday, Wedbush analysts led by Dan Ives, said: "We are raising our price target on Tesla to $400 from $300 as we believe the Trump White House win will be a game-changer for the autonomous and AI story for Tesla and Musk over the coming years."
Meanwhile, hedge funds holding onto bets against the stock have lost massively over the past week.
On Monday, Tesla shorts were down $8.72bn in mark-to-market losses since 4 November, according to data analytics firm S3 Partners.
UK-listed drugmaker AstraZeneca lifted its full-year sales and profit guidance, on the back of strong sales and revenue figures reported in its latest results released on Tuesday, though shares were little moved by the news.
AstraZeneca posted a 20% increase in product sales in the third quarter to nearly $13bn, which contributed to an 21% rise in total revenue to $13.6bn.
The company reported a 27% increase in core earnings per share for the quarter to $2.08.
As a result, AstraZeneca said it was now expecting "high teens percentage growth" in total revenue and core earnings per share for the full-year 2024 on a constant exchange rate basis.
Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, said the growth in total revenue and core earnings per share reflected the "increasing demand for our medicines across oncology, biopharmaceuticals and rare disease".
Soriot also addressed the probe into the president of its China operations, Leon Wang, with the company having confirmed to the Financial Times last week that he had been detained by Chinese authorities.
In Tuesday's results, Soriot said: "Finally, we take the matters in China very seriously. If requested we will fully cooperate with the authorities. We remain committed to delivering innovative life-changing medicines to patients in China."
Sheena Berry, healthcare analyst at Quilter Cheviot, said that "despite these overseas concerns, AstraZeneca remains on a very solid footing. Its strong, and crucially full, pipeline with a number of trial readouts and catalysts through 2025 bring an element of further growth even after this strong run.
"The long-term outlook remains attractive too with the group targeting $80bn in total revenue by 2030, and right now this is seeming very achievable."
The UK's financial watchdog said on Tuesday that it had fined Metro Bank ￡16.7m for "financial crime failings".
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said in a statement that between June 2016 and December 2020, Metro did not have the right systems and controls in place to monitor more than 60 million transactions, valued at over ￡51bn, for money laundering risks.
Therese Chambers, joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight for the FCA, said: "Metro's failings risked a gap being left in our defence against the criminal misuse of our financial system. Those failings went on for too long."
In a separate statement released on Tuesday, Daniel Frumkin, CEO of Metro Bank, said: "The conclusion of these enquiries draws a line under this legacy issue, allowing the bank to move forward and fully focus on the future, building on the solid foundations it has already laid."
A third quarter trading update released by Metro Bank on Tuesday showed a fall in assets, loans and deposits compared with the same period last year, though the bank said it was profitable in October on an underlying basis.
Shares in Metro Bank were up nearly 4% on Tuesday morning.
The latest results from SoftBank showed that the Japanese tech conglomerate had swung back into profit.
SoftBank posted net income of 1.2tn Japanese yen (￡5.1bn) for the six months ended 30 September, compared to a loss of 1.1tn Japanese yen for the same period last year.
The business generated an investment gain of 599.8bn yen from its SoftBank Vision Funds, which invests in technology. That's compared to a loss of 583.3bn yen for the same period last year.
SoftBank's investment business of holding companies generated a gain of 2.1tn yen, compared to a loss of 413.5bn for the same six-month period in 2023.
The conglomerate's Tokyo-listed shares closed Tuesday's session down 1%.
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Other companies in the news on Tuesday 12 November:
