What’s News in Markets: Silver’s Slide, Travel Chaos, Tesla Tanks

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Hey, listeners. It's Saturday, January 3rd. I'm Francesca Fontana for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News in Markets, our look at the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. Let's get to it. Welcome to 2026, everybody. Hope you all had a great time ringing in the new year. I myself had a rager, a marathon of Turner Classic movies with my cat. No better way to party in my book. Yes, it was a sleepy holiday in my house, and it was a pretty sleepy week in the market to close out 2025 No big rally to speak of on New Year's Eve. But how did stocks do for the year? Which was a volatile year at that. Well, all three indexes finished the year higher, with the S&P 500 marking its third back-to-back year of double-digit gains. The S&P gained 16% in 2025, while the Dow gained 13% and the NASDAQ rose 20%. And on the week, all three major indexes ended lower. The S&P fell 1%, the Dow lost about 0.7% and the NASDAQ fell 1.5%. Now, the end of 2025 also brought a sudden end to the wild ride for precious metals, as silver and others lost some of their shine for investors. For months, investors had been snapping up precious metals funds as protection against a potential weakening of the US dollar and uncertainty around richly valued tech stocks. But on Monday, silver futures experienced their steepest one-day decline in almost five years. Why the slide? Well, exchange operator CME Group increased margin requirements to ensure traders put down more cash on their bets, which CME and its peers typically do after price run-ups in commodities. And on Monday, shares of silver specialist Hekla Mining fell 5%, while shares of the gold mining giant Newmont fell 5.6%. And on a weekly basis, Hekla ended down 6.6% while Newmont fell 4.3%.

So, while I spent my holidays here in New York, those of you who traveled by air probably already have a good understanding of why some airline stocks were falling on Monday. Just in time for the year-end travel rush, holiday snowstorms across the US caused a flurry of cancellations ahead of the new year. After a weekend of chaotic travel, on Monday, more than 10,000 US flights were delayed, according to flight data specialist FlightAware. More than 900 flights within, into, or out of the US were cancelled. And so we saw, for instance, Delta Airlines shares fall 1.9% Monday, while American Airlines also lost 1.9% and United Airlines fell 2.3%. On a weekly basis, Delta lost 2.5%, United ended down 0.9%, and American ended up about 0.3%.

Finally, Elon Musk's Tesla is having a rough start to the new year, as a Chinese rival took its crown as the world's biggest seller of electric cars. On Friday, Tesla reported that its annual deliveries fell 8.6% from the year before, to roughly 1.6 million vehicles. Chinese auto company BYD, meanwhile, sold 2.26 million electric vehicles. It's certainly a reversal of fortunes for these two. Tesla was once the leading EV maker, while only a few years ago BYD's founder worried that the company might not survive. So how Tesla shares do? The stock ended up dropping 2.6% on Friday and notched a weekly loss of 7.8%. And now you know What's News in Markets this week. You can read about more stocks that moved on the week's news in The Score, my column in the Wall Street Journal's Exchange section. Today's show was produced by Michael LaValle with supervising producer Jana Herron. I'm Francesca Fontana. Have a great weekend and see you next Saturday.