Alibaba Group (BABA) perpetual market

Alibaba Group is China's largest e-commerce and technology conglomerate, founded in 1999 by Jack Ma and a group of colleagues. It built its dominance through online marketplaces, chiefly Taobao and Tmall, that connect hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers with merchants and handle an enormous volume of retail commerce. Beyond shopping, Alibaba operates one of Asia's largest cloud computing businesses, along with digital payments, logistics, media and international marketplaces, making it central to China's digital economy. The company completed a landmark US public listing in 2014, one of the biggest in history. Its trajectory has since been shaped heavily by Chinese government policy: a sweeping regulatory crackdown on technology firms that began in 2020, the shelving of the blockbuster IPO of its Ant Group affiliate and antitrust penalties weighed on the stock. Alibaba is often viewed as a barometer of both Chinese consumer strength and Beijing's stance toward its technology sector.