5 things to know before the opening of the stock market on February 19, 2021

Here are the most important news, trends and analyzes that investors need to start their trading day:

US futures rose on Friday after the Dow Jones industrial average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq suffered their biggest one-day losses in the hot month of February. The Dow, which broke a three-day winning streak and fell from a record high, remained on track for a positive week, which will be its third in a row. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq have been tracking losses for three days and are on pace for the first weeks of losses in the last three.

Bitcoin – which topped $ 52,000 this week – hit another all-time high early Friday, near $ 53,000 per unit. After Tesla and other companies recently showed support for the world’s largest cryptocurrency, large financial firms appear to be heating up. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CNBC on Thursday that she believes bitcoin is an “extremely speculative asset.”

As the House plans to pass its version of President Joe Biden’s coronavirus aid plan by the end of next week, Yellen told CNBC that a large package of incentives is needed to bring the economy back to power. “The price of doing too little is much higher than the price of doing something big,” she said. “We believe the benefits will far outweigh the long-term costs.” Democrats hope to get their bill through Congress before March 14, when key federal unemployment benefit programs expire.

Biden is expected to announce on Friday that the US will spend $ 4 billion on Covid’s international vaccination efforts. He will promise during his first virtual meeting as president with G-7 leaders. Biden will urge other nations to allocate more money to the global fight against the pandemic.

Later in the day, Biden travels to Michigan to visit the Pfizer vaccine plant in Kalamazoo, a trip that was supposed to take place on Thursday but was postponed due to winter weather. Biden made his first domestic trip as president on Tuesday, traveling to Wisconsin for a CNN town hall on coronavirus.

Uber shares fell 3% in the premarket after the UK’s top court ruled on Friday that the company’s drivers there should be classified as workers, rather than self-employed. The ruling puts an end to a nearly five-year legal battle between Uber and a group of former drivers in the UK. Uber insists that its drivers are self-employed and act rather as an “agency” that connects them with passengers through an app. The company met a challenge in its California domestic market in November, when voters backed a vote proposal that strengthened application-based food delivery and the status of travel drivers as independent, not hired, contractors.

During Thursday’s GameStop hearing on Capitol Hill, Citadel’s Ken Griffin defended a controversial method brokers use to make money and said his company will adapt if new regulations prohibit the practice. Members of Congress have spent much of their time trying to “pay for the order flow,” a practice in which a brokerage receives payments from a market maker such as Citadel for directing the order to them. This model is how Robinhood and other brokers can offer commission-free transactions. “I think paying for order flow has been an important source of innovation in the industry,” Griffin said.

– Reuters contributed to this report. Follow all the developments on Wall Street in real time with CNBC Pro’s live marketing blog. Get the latest pandemic information with our coronavirus blog.