Money Minute: Alibaba IPO Could Rival Facebook's

A Chinese company could offer the biggest-ever U.S. initial public offering.

Excitement is starting to build over the planned American IPO of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Yahoo (YHOO) owns nearly a quarter of the Chinese company, and details about its rapid growth showed up Yahoo's earnings report. Alibaba's quarterly profit doubled to $1.4 billion. Its sales volume was larger than that of Amazon.com (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY), the two largest U.S.-based online retailers, combined. Alibaba's IPO, planned for later this year, could be on par with Facebook's (FB).

Here on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average (^DJI) gained 89 points Tuesday, the Standard & Poor's 500 index (^GPSC) rose 12 points, and the Nasdaq composite (^IXIC) added 11 points.

Tuesday's session was volatile, and we could be in for another bout of that Wednesday. Investors are dealing with the crisis in Ukraine, GDP from China and a speech by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen.

More than two dozen major Nasdaq stocks have tumbled at least 20 percent from recent highs, %VIRTUAL-article-sponsoredlinks%including well-known names such as Netflix (NFLX), Staples (SPLS), Tesla Motors (TSLA), Sirius XM (SIRI), Amazon, Whole Foods Markets (WFM), Facebook and Yahoo. The worst performer is VimpelCom (VIP), a Chinese-based telecom company. It's down 45 percent from its 52 week high.

Detroit is a step closer to resolving the city's bankruptcy. Leaders of a group representing about 6,500 retired firefighters and police officers agreed to trim their retirement benefits and consider a possible reduction in their annual cost-of-living increases.

Finally, Pfizer (PFE) isn't going into the ice cream business -- and it's trying to stop a small British company from making Viagra-laced ice cream. The British company has mixed the erectile dysfunction drug into a blue-colored ice cream it calls "Arousal." Pfizer warns its blockbuster drug is a prescription only medicine. We'll stay clear of the obvious puns about Viagra ice cream.

-Produced by Drew Trachtenberg.