With record levels of dry powder available for investment, find out what's in store for private markets in 2025 and beyond.

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Hey, listeners. It's Saturday, March 1st. I'm Francesca Fontana for the Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News and Markets,

our look at the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them.

Let's get to it.

To refresh our memories, stocks logged gains for January and a strong start to 2025.

But trade drama, continued inflation, and AI competition fears did not do us any favors in February.

This week, for instance, NVIDIA's positive results still managed to cause a sell-off,

and we had more tariff threats from President Trump and retaliation threats from China,

not to mention the tense meeting between Trump and Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, after which stocks wobbled

before they recovered late Friday afternoon.

All in all, the three major indexes ended the week mixed.

And for the month of February, the SMP 500 and the Dow each fell about one and a half percent,

while the NASDAQ dropped nearly 4%.

We got some fresh earnings reports this week, including from Home Depot, the Home Improvement

Giant.

Even the less handy among us certainly know the orange logo.

Home Depot delivered a better than expected quarter, beating Wall Street's expectations for quarterly sales and profit, and the company said it's increasing its quarterly dividend to $2.30 a share.

Home Depot said that demand was strong for things like appliances, building materials, and lumber, but weaker for projects like kitchen and bathroom remodels, you know, the kind of big purchases

that a lot of us might typically use financing for, like a credit card or a personal loan.

And the company sees higher interest rates continuing to strain people's wallets when it comes

to big-ticket purchases. And as a result, it offered cautious guidance.

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