We recently published a list of 10 Firms Kick Off Monday Leading Gains. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU) stands against other firms that kick off Monday leading gains.

The stock market kicked off the week’s trading on a positive note, with all main indices finishing in the green territory, as economies took a pause from their tariff war, while investors breathed a sigh of relief on the February retail sales report which didn’t come worse.

According to the latest figures, retail sales rose 0.2 percent, albeit below the 0.6 percent as expected by analysts. Excluding autos, sales are up by 0.3 percent, in line with economists’ expectations.

Following the news, the Dow Jones clocked in a 0.85-percent gain, followed by the S&P 500 with 0.64 percent, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq with 0.31 percent.

Meanwhile, 10 companies that led the rally posted modest gains as fresh company developments sparked investor buying. In this article, we have listed Monday’s 10 top performers and detailed the reasons behind their gains.

To come up with the list, we considered only the stocks with $2 billion market capitalization and $5 million in trading volume.

A modern internet space with a person using Baidu services on a laptop.

Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU)

Baidu surged by 9.01 percent on Monday to end at $102.27 apiece as investors cheered news that it launched two new Artificial Intelligence models which it claims deliver the same performance as DeepSeek’s at an even lower price.

On Sunday, BIDU introduced the ERNIE X1 and ERNIE 4.5, as the company became the new addition to the heating up AI industry to challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek.

“ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price,” the company said, adding that it has “stronger understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution capabilities,” and that it is the first deep thinking model that uses tools autonomously.

Meanwhile, the ERNIE 4.5 has “excellent multimodal understanding ability. It has more advanced language ability, and its understanding, generation, logic, and memory abilities are comprehensively improved.”

Overall, BIDU ranks 4th on our list of firms that kick off Monday leading gains. While we acknowledge the potential of BIDU as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as BIDU but trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.