you know for more we turn to our own christiane christine joining us from los angeles kristie we heard a lot there about the future of crypto crypto is increasingly viewed as treated as a separate asset class and is festers portfolios it's getting that standing now when only a couple years ago it was regarded almost as a worthless bad how and why is this shift happening. why i think it's really hard to classify something as a fad one has surpassed $200000000000.00 in market cap but it's actually really difficult to pinpoint exactly when the sentiment shift happened i think for most investors it actually happened when they started abusing cryptocurrency as a separate asset class and of itself because it's really actually hard to classify it has the upside profile of an equity it's not exactly a commodity even though it does have aspects of value storage it's not exactly a currency but it does have trades of f.x. in the. it's a hedge against currency inflation so they have like different profiles within all that spectrum so it's really difficult to label so now investors are increasing v

first, this week's "before the bell" with christian romans. christine?u.s. and china might be approaching an end game. trade representative last week, robert lighthizer and treasury secretary steven mnuchin traveled to beijing. the white house described those talks as productive. this week the dialogue moves to washington when china's top trade negotiator goes there. investors also remain focused on first-quarter earnings -- disney, news corp., etsy and overstock.com are among the companies reporting. lyft also delivers its first earnings report as a publicly traded company. shares are down more than 20% from their ipo price of $72. that disappointing performance has reined in expectations for uber's debut. the ride-hailing giant aims to sell its shares for $44 to $50 apiece. all in, that represents a valuation of $91 billion. uber originally targeted a valuation of $100 billion, according to the "wall street journal." look for the company to price thursday night and begin trading on friday. in new york, i'm christine romans. ♪ you should be mad they gav

scented its founding in two thousand and nine let's get the latest from christine salumi at the new york stock exchange for is christian a lot of anticipation ahead of this i.p.o. why so much excitement over a company that has yet to be profitable. yeah maybe too much excitement as we saw with those opening trades falling below expectations coming in around forty two dollars a share as opposed to the forty five dollars that was set for the opening price look it's a difficult day on wall street in general with trade concerns weighing down the markets overall and there's been a lot of questions about. his business model going forward and whether or not it will ever become profitable this is a company that has lost one billion dollars so far this year alone last year it lost three billion dollars in revenues that eleven billion dollars but it's also a company that has continued to grow the name has become synonymous with ride to hayling in the company says look we're doing a lot of things that haven't been done before not just right handling we're investing in driverless cars and scooters we've got this. food delivery ser