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1. European stocks rallied on French politics and robust earnings from LVMH.

LVMH sparked a rally in luxury groups and quelled concerns that slowing global growth and tariff wars are taking a toll on corporate health.

LVMH shares were down 16% year to date as of Tuesday's close, now it's just 6%. That move, with spillovers into other luxury stocks, has also driven French and broader European indexes higher. An index of the 10 biggest luxury names is up 6.8% and France's CAC 40 is up well over 2% and back at its March highs. The prospect France might actually get a budget passed is also providing a boost at the margin, but it's luxury that's doing the heavy lifting.

2. The roaring twenties for the investment banks.

America’s biggest banks roared into Q3 with their strongest results in years, fueled by a surge in dealmaking, record trading desks, and resilient consumers. M&A volumes topped $1 trillion, volatility kept markets busy, and wealth management quietly became a star performer as rising equity markets lifted client assets and fee income. Credit quality remains solid, loan growth is accelerating, and even long-dormant divisions like services and retail banking are setting records.

However, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon said that bankers have to look out for cockroaches- they might step on one. Dimon was referring to his bank’s lending to nonbank institutions that are facing higher threats of a credit crunch. JPM had to pay out $170M after its subprime auto loan client Tricolor declared bankruptcy in Sept. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” Dimon told analysts Tuesday.

3. Gold is extremely overbought, but there are no sellers in sight.

The central banks have been the primary drivers of the rally so far, but they have not traded their gold for decades, so there’s no compelling reason why they’d start now.

The pandemic, the seizure of Russian reserve assets and the trade war have prompted a radical global rethink about the extent of dollar exposure, with gold reserves rising and dollar-denominated ones falling as a result.

4. Broadcom's bet on OpenAI is a big gamble.

The scale of OpenAI's deals is remarkable: together, they would involve filling data centers with chips and other computing infrastructure that consume 26 gigawatts of electricity -- an amount that would dwarf what New York City uses at peak demand in the summer.

And yet that is only about a tenth of what Chief Executive Sam Altman recently told employees he wanted to build in the next eight years.

The thing is, it isn't clear how OpenAI is going to pay for all of it, including the deal with Broadcom.

OpenAI's revenue this year is expected to be around $13 billion, a substantial sum for a startup but nowhere close to enough to justify Altman's exuberance. The company has told investors it won't be profitable until 2029. The story of AI, in Altman's telling, is one of exponential growth where competitors who balk at risk-taking now fall behind later. Altman has discussed new tools to help finance his aspirations and realizing them increasingly involves large amounts of debt. For Broadcom, though, it amounts to a big bet on a chancy customer. Investors seem content to ignore such concerns, as Broadcom shares now trade at about 40 times next year's earnings.

5. China now installs more industrial robots each year than the rest of the world combined.

Its robot density (robots per 10,000 workers) has surged past advanced economies like Germany, the US, and Japan.

This transformation isn’t just about scale. It reflects a deep structural shift — from labor-cost advantage to productivity and precision dominance. Chinese factories, powered by robotics and AI, are fast becoming the global benchmark for efficiency.

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