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1. While European banks are tracking a third straight year of gains, the rally is far from overheating.

The banks index remains about 45% below its peak in 2007, before the global financial crisis.

Valuations fell last week, partly due to the return of political turmoil in France after Prime Minister Francois Bayrou announced a confidence vote. Banks are not only a typical proxy for political instability, they’re also exposed to both the value of French government bonds and the premium investors demand to hold them. Some market participants including at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs remain confident that French banks, which have the third-biggest weighting in the CAC 40 Index, will be able to weather the heightened sovereign risk. “Their capital positions are extremely strong and we didn’t move the needle in terms of our expectations for economic growth,” says Sharon Bell, a strategist at Goldman Sachs.

2. Alibaba AI accelerates.

China e-commerce revenue increased 10%, and Cloud accelerated 26% Y/Y (from 18% Y/Y in the prior quarter), with AI-related product revenue posting an eighth straight quarter of triple-digit growth.

3. What is scale-up networking?

“The scale-up network refers to high-speed communication between GPUs/accelerators in the same server or rack.

Interconnecting accelerators allows them to function as one large supercomputer, accessing the same memory and processing the same workload.

This is distinct from scale-out networking, which involves connecting multiple systems across a broader data center infrastructure.

The total scale-up network was $4bn in 2024 and is expected to grow at a 34% CAGR to $17bn by 2029. The vast majority of the scale-up market today is NVIDIA's proprietary NVLink, which is exclusively used to interconnect their GPUs. Outside of the NVIDIA ecosystem there is a massive greenfield opportunity with multiple competing technologies from Astera, Broadcom and Marvell.

4. As the Trump administration doubles down on fossil fuels, the rest of the world is accelerating into clean energy.

Solar is set to quadruple by 2030.

5. The Buffett indicator for the total US stock market is at 217%.

The Buffett Indicator is the ratio of total US stock market value divided by GDP.

Named after Warren Buffett, who called the ratio "the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment".

(Buffett has since walked back those comments, hesitating to endorse any single measure as either comprehensive or consistent over time, but this ratio remains credited to his name.)

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