TipRanks' analyst ranking service reveals three dividend-paying stocks, including Ares Capital and ConocoPhillips.

Jensen Huang is the CEO of Nvidia ( NVDA 4.45%), a company whose chips power the vast majority of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. At a technology conference last year, Huang made a bold declaration: "The next wave of AI is here. Robotics, powered by physical AI, will revolutionize industries."

Shares in Australia gained 0.4%, while Japan’s Topix dropped in its first session after a multiday holiday. US contracts were little changed after the S&P 500 ended Friday up 1.3%, ending a selloff that had wiped more than a trillion dollars from the equity market.

A soft finish to 2024 still left stocks with a second straight stellar year. The S&P 500 logged a 23.3% gain, which follows a 24% rise in 2023. The combined gains of more than 53% was the largest two-year percentage jump for the index since year-end 1998,

Dan Ives believes Apple and Microsoft will be $4 trillion companies by the end of 2025. Apple CEO Tim Cook believes Apple Intelligence will usher in a new era for the iPhone. Microsoft's AI business is on track to generate $10 billion in revenue next quarter.

The S&P 500 posted back-to-back annual gains of more than 20 percent for the first time since the late 1990s. Analysts expect stocks to continue rising in 2025.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was one of the driving themes in the market in 2024, powering a number of stocks to new highs. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) originally developed its graphics processing units (GPUs) to speed up the rendering of video game graphics.