1. At last, a green day.

After several weak sessions, U.S. stocks finally caught a bid, but sentiment remains fragile as investors fear tariffs and more Trump surprises.

The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation metric, the core PCE price index, fell to a seven-month low during January, helping ease concerns from other inflation metrics that prices could accelerate to the upside again.

With this better-than-expected inflation figure, the market is now setting the stage for a potential comeback.

Here’s the S&P 500 heatmap. 11 of 11 sectors closed green, with financials (+2.05%) leading.

2. The “anti-Trump trade” is a big winner.

“This year Canadian, Colombian, Mexican, European and Chinese technology stocks are all outpacing the S&P 500, the dollar is down and the Magnificent Seven big tech companies—five of whose CEOs stood behind the president at his inauguration—have stopped leading the U.S. market up and turned into laggards.

The reality is that what looks like an anti-Trump trade is a big market rotation.

Feeding into the moves are a bunch of disconnected events: prospects for peace in Ukraine, hope of stimulus in Germany, a pro-business turn in China, cheap artificial intelligence and a slowing U.S. economy.

Investors need to decide if the rotation is a traditional bull-market switch in leadership as the Mag7 are exhausted by their huge run-up last year—or is a sign of deeper trouble ahead.”

Source: WSJ

3. The “oracle from Omaha” has spoken.

“Having loads of liquidity lets us sleep well ... during episodes of financial chaos that occasionally erupt in our economy, we will be equipped both financially and emotionally to play offense while others scramble for survival.” - Warren Buffett

4. Amazon unveils its first quantum chip.

Following Google and Microsoft’s quantum computing announcements, the tech giant says its new chip will lead to more reliable quantum computers.

A fundamental building block of quantum computers called a qubit is fast but finicky and prone to errors.

Our “Ocelot” chip is a prototype, not a “full-blown quantum system,” said Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware for AWS. “It’s designed to test our ability to perform quantum error correction, and once we have that building block, then we can scale it up to a much larger size.”

Quantum computers hold the promise of carrying out computations that would take conventional computers millions of years and could help scientists develop new materials such as batteries and new drugs.

5. “The reliability of humanoid robots still needs a lot of work, probably decades.”

“At the moment, humanoid robots cost tens of thousands of dollars and don’t last long before they need to be recharged. They also overheat, preventing them from moving for extended periods of time.”

“There isn't a humanoid hardware that you can buy and say it's reliable. That simply doesn't exist today,” Agrawal said. Pulkit Agrawal is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

This being said, the past few months saw a number of new collaboration agreements between hardware and AI counterparts. Expect that trend to continue.

Most robotics startups have high quality hardware and engineering talent, but lack the capital/resources to build in-house foundational models or grow the compute base to develop robotic autonomy capabilities. Many major technology firms have access to vast amounts of compute and high-performing AI models, but lack the 'socket' to bring their creations to the physical world.

The result is the high number of partnerships seen over the past year+, including Google & Apptronik, Figure & Microsoft, Figure & OpenAI (recently ended), Baidu & UBTech, Huawei & Leju Robot, and NVIDIA & the majority of the humanoid startup ecosystem.

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