Jump Trading Group, one of the world’s largest high-frequency trading firms, will launch a unit that executes stock orders for individual investors, a business that has grown more lucrative for electronic traders as meme-stock mania has fueled a surge in U.S. retail volumes.

Executives at Jump told The Wall Street Journal that the firm is setting up a so-called retail wholesaler business. Wholesalers fill buy and sell orders for the customers of online brokerages such as Robinhood Markets Inc. and TD Ameritrade.

Chicago-based Jump is a big player in global markets, despite its low profile and penchant for secrecy. The firm is active on futures, options and stock exchanges around the world and is a major trader of Treasurys and cryptocurrencies. It employs more than 900 people and has offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Wholesalers generally make money by collecting a small spread between the buying and selling price of stocks, often just a fraction of...

Investors poured $705 billion into exchange-traded funds through the first seven months of the year, pushing 2021’s world-wide tally to a record $9.1 trillion, according to data from Morningstar Inc.

Net flows so far this year have nearly eclipsed the $736.5 billion investors had moved into ETFs globally in all of 2020. Most of the cash has gone into cheap, index-tracking funds, with large-cap and short-term bond ETFs, as well as products offering inflation protection, attracting significant investor interest, according to the data.

U.S. ETFs accounted for a record $519 billion of the total, sending assets in U.S. funds to about $6.6 trillion. ETFs now hold more money than index-tracking mutual funds, which had about $8.8 trillion in assets as of June, though mutual funds overall still command more money, with about $40.7 trillion in assets.

ETFs are baskets of securities that are as easy to trade as a stock. They lack the investment minimums found in...

Siemens , ABB and Schneider Electric were at the heart of electrifying society last century. In the new age of electrification, they have a different focus: digital technology.

With roots stretching back to the 19th century, the trio helped build Europe’s electricity infrastructure, from power plants through to plug sockets. Like General Electric in the U.S., Siemens even made machines that plugged into the wall. However, all three European companies have turned away from high-voltage transmission projects as another electrification wave promises to decarbonize the economy.

Instead, the trio are focusing on the long-mooted industrial internet-of-things: using digital technologies to make buildings, industrial production and local power systems smarter and more efficient. They have “a clear strategy of walking away from project businesses and focusing on product businesses,” says Guillermo Peigneux Lojo, an analyst at UBS. The latter, which include...

One of the things most cryptocurrency enthusiasts really don’t want is more exposure to the U.S. government. It turns out—via the biggest so-called stablecoin, tether—that is exactly what they got. Holdings of Treasury bills backing tether surged, according to the first accountant-verified breakdown of its issuer’s $63 billion of assets.

Tether is designed to trade one-for-one with the dollar and has become immensely popular as a way for traders quickly to shift money between crypto exchanges or park cash without going through the hassle of transferring it to a bank account.

But its peg to the dollar is dependent on the value and availability of its investments, and here the new disclosure brings both good and bad news. The good news is that with more detailed disclosure and the stamp of approval from an accountant, it is less likely that Tether, the company that issues the coin, and linked crypto brokerage Bitfinex are repeating the illegal practices that led...

The government corporate intervention in China that has hammered internet stocks is driving investors to sectors still in Beijing’s good graces, such as high-tech manufacturing and renewable energy.

Shares of Chinese semiconductor companies, electric-vehicle manufacturers and solar-panel makers listed in mainland China climbed over the past month while shares of technology giants and companies that provide after-school tutoring suffered massive selloffs.

The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets haven’t been immune to the effects of Beijing’s regulatory clampdown on private-sector companies, but they have performed significantly better than Chinese stocks listed on exchanges in the U.S. and Hong Kong.

An MSCI index that tracks onshore China A-shares has fallen 3.2% since the start of July, compared with a 12% decline for the broader MSCI China index, heavily influenced by Tencent Holdings Ltd. , Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , Meituan and other...

WASHINGTON—The White House urged OPEC to boost oil production Wednesday, saying recent planned increases are insufficient as countries around the world seek to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that recent planned production increases by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries would “not fully offset previous production cuts” made by OPEC and its oil-producing allies during the pandemic.

“At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, fell 0.8% to $70.04 a barrel after the White House announcement. Oil prices have experienced volatility in recent days due to concerns over the Delta variant of Covid-19.

In July, OPEC and a group of Russian-led oil producers agreed to unleash millions of barrels of crude over the next two years, committing to restore all the cuts they made at the start...

Securities regulators are rethinking rules on popular plans that let corporate executives sell stock without violating insider-trading provisions.

The plans—known as 10b5-1 plans—allow executives to create schedules for buying and selling shares in the future. In theory, a predetermined sale, even if it comes at a fortuitous time, wouldn’t be based on inside information.

But years of research has shown that the reality is more complicated: Executives might establish a plan to sell shares that very day. Executives could set up a raft of plans to sell on different days, then cancel most of them. They can modify plans without disclosing what they are doing.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler has expressed skepticism about the plans and in June asked the commission’s staff to recommend changes that would curb abuses. Lawmakers called for changes last year after pharmaceutical executives developing Covid-19 vaccines sold $500 million...

Shares of China Evergrande Group jumped Wednesday after the cash-strapped property developer said it is in talks to sell some of its prized assets.

The real estate conglomerate’s Hong Kong-listed shares rose more than 10%, building on gains from earlier in the week, which helped to lift the stock prices of other Chinese residential developers.

Evergrande’s dollar bonds also traded higher Wednesday—though they remain at distressed levels—and its shares are down by more than half in the year-to-date period. One of the company’s bonds that pays a 10.5% coupon and comes due in 2024 was recently bid on at 46 cents on the dollar, up about 2 cents, according to Tradeweb data. That level still implies a high likelihood of default.

Evergrande, one of China’s largest developers and the country’s biggest junk bond issuer, said in a stock exchange filing after Tuesday’s market close that it is in discussions to sell some of its ownership in its electric vehicle...

U.S. stocks edged higher and Treasury yields ticked lower Wednesday after the release of inflation data for July.

The S&P 500 ticked up 0.3% after notching a record Tuesday. The Nasdaq Composite Index rose 0.3% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.4%, or 126 points.

Coinbase Global shares added 6.9% after the cryptocurrency exchange posted growing revenue and usage. They were also boosted by a rally in cryptocurrencies, which powered ahead early Wednesday.

edged up 0.6% from its 5 p.m. ET level Tuesday to $45,887.93, on track for its third consecutive day of gains. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, rose 2.1%.

Shares of website design platform Wix.com fell more than 9% after the company said it saw a mild slowdown in the creation of new web presences.

U.S. stock futures edged higher and Treasury yields ticked lower Wednesday after the release of inflation data for July.

Futures tied to the S&P 500 ticked up 0.1%, pointing to the broad market benchmark opening higher after notching a record Tuesday. Contracts tied to the Nasdaq-100 rose 0.3% and futures linked to the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged almost 0.2% higher.

Before the U.S. opening bell, Coinbase Global shares added 2.1% after the cryptocurrency exchange posted growing revenue and usage. They were also boosted by a rally in cryptocurrencies, which powered ahead early Wednesday.

edged up 0.6% from its 5 p.m. ET level Tuesday to $45,887.93, on track for its third consecutive day of gains. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, rose 2.1%.

Shares of website design platform Wix.com fell more than 9% after the company said it saw a mild slowdown in the creation of new web presences.

Retail favorite dogecoin has rallied 29% this week to about 26 U.S. cents alongside a broader rally in cryptocurrencies. Individual investors have been piling into cryptocurrencies in recent weeks, according to data provider VandaTrack. Crypto stocks like Bit Digital , Coinbase and Riot Blockchain have also seen a rise in volume for call options, which give investors the right to buy cryptocurrencies at a specific price later in time. Dogecoin is up 1.9% on Wednesday from its 5 p.m. ET level on Tuesday. Bitcoin and ether were both up too, by 0.9% and 2.2% respectively. Crypto-exchange operator Coinbase Global shares are up 4.8% premarket after it saw revenue surge in a volatile quarter that it said highlighted the “still-early days” of the “crypto economy.” Fast-food chain Wendy’s jumped 4.5% premarket after it reported a sales boost in the recent quarter, lifted its dividend and increased its buyback program. Clothing retailer  Canada Goose dropped 5.5%. Its...

Inflation remained elevated in July, as the economy continued to rebound amid pandemic-related shortages of labor and supplies.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that its consumer-price index rose 5.4% in July from a year earlier, the same pace as in June and the highest 12-month rate since 2008.

The CPI climbed a seasonally adjusted 0.5% in July from June, a slightly cooler pace than its 0.9% increase in June from May.

The index measures what consumers pay for goods and services, including groceries, clothes, restaurant meals, recreation and vehicles. The so-called core price index, which excludes the often volatile categories of food and energy, increased 4.3% from a year before.

Inflation has heated up this year for several reasons. U.S. gross domestic product rose at a rapid 6.5% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the second quarter, powered by consumer spending that climbed at an 11.8% pace as more people received vaccinations,...

The economy is on track to later this year satisfy the Federal Reserve’s threshold to begin reducing its $120 billion in monthly asset purchases, a top central bank official said Tuesday.

Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said he expected recent employment gains to continue, which would allow the Fed to declare that the economy has achieved the “substantial further progress” it laid out last December.

“I’d like to see a few more employment reports” before making that determination, Mr. Evans told reporters during an online news conference. “We’re coming upon a time where it’s definitely going to be appropriate to start” reducing the pace of asset purchases.

“There’s a sense in which you want to be careful that you don’t start prematurely [and] you don’t start too late,” said Mr. Evans, who is a voting member of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee this year.

Mr. Evans said he expects the unemployment rate to fall to 4.5% by...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission awarded more than $3.5 million to a whistleblower whose tip helped the regulator expand an existing investigation that led to civil bribery charges against networking and cybersecurity solutions company Juniper Networks Inc.

The regulator, which announced the award Tuesday, didn’t name the company and didn’t identify the tipster, in keeping with its policy. But lawyers representing the whistleblower said the award was connected to the 2019 cease-and-desist order involving Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper over allegations that the company violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act through its subsidiaries in Russia and China.

The number of available jobs since May has outnumbered Americans looking for work. One factor is a mismatch between where people want to work and which industries are hiring.

The hardest-hit industries have yet to recover to prepandemic levels, when 63% of Americans were in the labor force. In July, there were 5.7 million fewer jobs, on a seasonally adjusted basis, than there were in February 2020, according to Labor Department data.

The number of people trying to get back into the workforce has rebounded since the early days of the pandemic. The share of adults working or looking for a job has increased slightly from a low of 60.2% in April of last year to 61.7% in July.

Leisure and hospitality workers have seen the highest hiring rates and a boost in weekly earnings as easing restrictions allowed restaurants to reopen and travel to resume. However, the rise in cases from the Delta variant could loom over the rebound.

Hiring in manufacturing...

The IPO market is hotter than ever this summer—and so is competition for exchange-bell ringing privileges.

An initial public offering is the ultimate marketing event, and a glitzy bell-ringing ceremony an indispensable component. CEOs, employees and early investors line up on a podium, smile for the television cameras and press a button to ring the bell that heralds the start of trading. Cheers commence.

IPO activity so far in 2021 has already surpassed that of every full year on record, with more than 20 companies going public a week on average. That means there just aren’t enough bell-ringing opportunities to go around.

Companies are going to great lengths to achieve their bell-ringing dreams.

GXO Logistics Inc., which spun off from XPO Logistics Inc. earlier this month and manages supply chains for companies such as Apple Inc. and Nike Inc., was able to secure a bell because its trading debut fell on a Monday, when few listings occur. But...

Fanatics Inc. raised a new round of funding valuing the online sports-merchandise retailer at $18 billion, people familiar with the matter said, roughly tripling its valuation from a year ago as it works to expand into new business lines, including sports betting.

The company raised $325 million in a funding round that closed Monday with new investors including rapper Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and the entertainment company he founded called Roc Nation LLC and existing investors Major League Baseball, SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund, and private-equity giant Silver Lake, the people said.

Fanatics has been working to grow its business beyond its core of selling sports apparel and memorabilia online and some bricks-and-mortar locations. It launched a nonfungible token company called Candy Digital earlier this year.

The company plans to use the new capital to transform itself into a digital platform with multiple related businesses, such as ticketing and...

WASHINGTON -- One of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges has agreed to pay $100 million to resolve a regulatory lawsuit over its failure to follow U.S. rules while allowing Americans to access its trading platform.

BitMEX, which offers leveraged trading in bitcoin and other cryptocurrency derivatives, had been sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last year. Its four co-founders were indicted at the same time for their alleged roles in failing to use an effective anti-money-laundering program. They have pleaded not guilty.

BitMEX, which was incorporated in the Seychelles, has also agreed to prevent U.S. residents from using its trading services, the CFTC said in a press release Tuesday.

Write to Dave Michaels at dave.michaels@wsj.com

Major stock indexes rose Tuesday as investors weighed the strong earnings season against risks posed by the Delta coronavirus variant.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.5%, or about 163 points, as of the 4 p.m. close of trading in New York, while the S&P 500 added 0.1%. Both stock gauges were on pace to close above last week’s all-time highs. The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped about 0.5%, weighed down by losses in big tech stocks.

The earnings season that is now winding down has bolstered the case for stocks, with analysts expecting that profits from companies in the S&P 500 grew 90% in the second quarter from a year earlier, easily surpassing earlier projections.

At the same time, many investors are watching with concern the increase in Covid-19 cases in the U.S. Some local governments and businesses have reinstated restrictions, raising questions about the economic outlook.

“I’m looking at really, really great, strong...

So much for the pandemic-driven productivity boom?

A quick look at the latest figures suggests this might be so. The Labor Department on Tuesday reported that productivity, as measured by how much the typical worker gets done in an hour, rose at a 2.3% annual rate in the second quarter from the previous quarter, putting it 1.9% above its year-earlier level. That was a significant slowdown from the first quarter, when productivity was up 4.1% from a year earlier, marking its biggest advance in over a decade.

Productivity growth could slow further in the current quarter. That is because even though the U.S. economy continues to grow at a decent clip, so too does the job market. The story goes like this: In the initial stages of the recovery, demand grew much faster than businesses were able, or willing, to hire. Existing employees worked like crazy and output per hour rose as a result. It wasn’t sustainable—people can only work so hard—and now employment is...

Policy moves in Beijing are hitting Chinese corporate bonds and rippling across global markets through the U.S. and European money managers who loaded up on the securities in recent years.

Emerging-markets investors have long been subject to such shocks, but Chinese bonds are now so widely held that swings in their prices are affecting even bond funds that don’t specialize in developing countries, including funds managed by firms such as Pacific Investment Management Co. and BlackRock Inc.

Global bond funds with the most Chinese corporate debt lagged behind their benchmark indexes over the month that ended last Thursday, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from Morningstar Inc. The underperformance coincides with declines in stocks and bonds of Chinese private education, technology and property companies, triggered by regulatory and policy changes.

Chinese authorities recently disclosed plans to make private education companies such as...

The Journal collected nearly 13,000 ESG scores in May 2021 from the websites of three prominent ratings firms—Refinitiv Holdings Ltd., MSCI Inc. and Sustainalytics, a Morningstar company—and identified 1,469 companies rated by all three.

The Journal relied on each rater’s taxonomy and score to create a common seven-point scale where lower values indicate superior ESG  performance. MSCI scores companies on a scale ranging from leader (AAA, AA) to average (A, BBB, BB) to laggard (B, CCC). The  Journal mapped AAA to 1, AA to 2, A to 3 and so on.

Refinitiv rates companies on a scale from 0 to 100, classifying those in the bottom 25% of scores as companies with poor ESG performance and those in the top 25% as excellent performers.

The Journal used seven bins each 12 points wide to group companies. For instance, a score of 94 (the highest score in the data set examined by the Journal) to 82 from Refinitiv was converted to 1 on the Journal’s scale....

Two Canadian railroads’ bids to snag U.S. carrier Kansas City Southern is, appropriately enough, resembling a hockey game with the action whizzing between each team’s goal.

But Canadian Pacific ’s latest gambit to keep the U.S. freight railroad out of larger rival Canadian National ’s hands is the equivalent of pulling the goalie before it needs to. Its management is clearly desperate, but they need a lesson in game theory.

After having its deal for the smallest U.S. Class I carrier snatched away by a superior offer from Canadian National, the smaller of the two Canadian carriers initially failed to raise its bid but has now reversed course and done so with the deal on the cusp of approval. Proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services has advised KCS’s shareholders to accept Canadian National’s offer when they vote on Aug. 19.

Canadian Pacific’s new bid of $90 a share plus 2.884 of its own shares is financially inferior to its rival’s offer, which...