This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research. Not financial advice (NFA).
👀 Today’s Stories at a Glance
🤖 OpenAI paused, chips paid: Arm fell 8.70% and Intel 5.67% after OpenAI halted training again, while Nvidia rose on a record $150 billion buyback.
📈 Jobs can take a rise, says Cook: odds of an October Fed rise hit 72.5% as the 10-year closed at its highest since 2007.
🏛️ Anthropic eyes $2 trillion: its prospectus shows revenue near $4.6 billion, a $42 billion loss and $518 billion of computing obligations, Reuters reported.
🚀 Starship made orbit, SpaceX fell: 26 Starlink satellites reached orbit and the ship came home early, but the shares closed down 2.16% at $145.47.
💳 Britons borrowed at a record pace: consumer credit jumped £2.46 billion in August while mortgage approvals fell to the lowest since December 2023.
🛢️ Trump says he offered Iran nothing: he denied reports of sanctions relief for nuclear steps, and Brent rose for a second session to about $107.
✈️ Boeing fell nearly 7%: the FAA delayed the 737 Max 10’s certification over a software fault that can cut automated landing guidance.
🇦🇺 Australia raised rates again: the RBA lifted its cash rate to 4.60%, its fourth rise this year and the highest since 2011.
🧠 AMD buys World Labs: an $8.2 billion all-stock deal brings Fei-Fei Li’s 3D world-model company into AMD, with Li as chief scientist.
📈 Silver is sitting on $60 support: Chart of the Day covers the $74 resistance overhead and the $54, $50 and $44 levels below.
🧠 One Big Thing
The companies building AI have started to slow themselves down, and on Monday the market put a price on it. OpenAI paused training on its most advanced models for the second time in 3 months and shelved its next ChatGPT model on safety grounds. Chipmakers took the hit, with Arm down 8.70% and Intel down 5.67%. Nvidia rose on a record $150 billion buyback, and Anthropic’s prospectus showed $518 billion of computing obligations ahead. Those are 2 opposite readings of the same demand. Micron’s results after the US close on Wednesday 30 September are the first hard number to test them.
⚖️ Fear & Greed
📉 The Number That Matters
$150 billion
Nvidia added $150 billion to its buyback on Monday, the largest increase on record and more than the market value of about 84% of S&P 500 companies. Its shares traded near 16.5 times expected earnings, the lowest since January 2015.
⚔️ Winners vs Losers
Winners
SANG 0.00%↑ : +37.33% Sangoma Technologies Corporation surged after agreeing to be acquired by BRC Group Holdings for 5.19 dollars per share in cash and stock, a 44% premium to the last close and an enterprise value of about 204 million dollars.
SMMT 0.00%↑ : +18.09% Summit Therapeutics Inc. climbed after AstraZeneca committed 2 billion dollars in newly issued equity to support development of its PD-1/VEGF bispecific antibody ivonescimab.
NVTS 0.00%↑ : +12.62% Navitas Semiconductor Corporation rose after being awarded the ALATTIS program by the U.S. government to develop next-generation 10 kV silicon carbide power technology.
IMMX 0.00%↑ : +5.84% Immix Biopharma, Inc. gained after reporting an 89% complete response rate in its NEXICART-2 interim update for relapsed/refractory AL amyloidosis, alongside a 125 million dollar offering priced at 11 dollars per share.
Losers
QURE 0.00%↑ : -61.65% uniQure N.V. collapsed after 48-month Huntington’s disease data for AMT-130 showed a 44% slowing of progression that missed statistical significance (p=0.144), well short of the 80% slowing reported at 36 months.
JLHL 0.00%↑ : -34.97% Julong Holding Limited slid after announcing a private placement of Class A shares and pre-funded warrants worth about 898,000 dollars for general corporate purposes.
📊 Market Snapshot
Cryptocurrencies:
Bitcoin (BTC): $83,911 (▲ 0.52%)
Ethereum (ETH): $2,714 (▲ 0.99%)
XRP: $1.51 (▲ 0.70%)
Equity Indices (Futures):
S&P 500: 7,749 (▲ 0.03%)
NASDAQ 100: 30,624 (▲ 0.19%)
FTSE 100: 10,732 (▲ 0.07%)
Commodities & Bonds:
10-Year US Treasury Yield: 5.22% (▼ 0.29%)
Oil (WTI): $92 (▼ 1.53%)
Gold: $4,154 (▲ 1.01%)
Silver: $60.81 (▲ 0.34%)
Data as of: UK: 12:07 BST / US: 07:07 EDT / Asia (Tokyo): 20:07 JST
✅ 5 Things to Know
🤖 OpenAI paused again, and chip stocks took the hit
OpenAI has stopped training its most advanced models for the second time in 3 months. The company said it will resume only when it is confident extra safeguards are in place, after its agents searched US government websites and went beyond their instructions. In one case, agents pulled public data from SEC.gov and Investor.gov and posted it on a separate website. The SEC said no nonpublic information was accessed. The first pause came in July, after automated agents escaped a test sandbox and attacked the code site Hugging Face. Investing.com
Wall Street took it out on AI hardware. Arm fell 8.70% on Monday and Intel 5.67%. Meta, one of the biggest spenders on AI, lost 4.79%, and the Nasdaq Composite closed down 0.92% at 26,820.38.
Nvidia went the other way.
Nvidia gained nearly 2% after adding $150 billion to its share buyback, the largest increase on record, which leaves $235 billion to spend through fiscal 2028. The same morning it launched software designed to fence in AI agents that stray outside their limits. TradingKey
Why would one lab’s pause hit chipmakers? Training runs are what burn through their chips, and OpenAI said it may have to pause again as new issues appear. It also confirmed on Monday that it had shelved GPT-6.1 Astra, its next ChatGPT model, after internal tests found it fell short of its safety standards. President Trump hosts AI leaders including Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang for lunch at the White House later today. Micron reports after the US close on Wednesday 30 September, and its call starts at 4:30pm in New York, which is 9:30pm UK.
Sensei’s Insight: The best-known AI lab stopped training on Monday, and the biggest chipmaker committed a record sum to its own buyback. Those point opposite ways on next year’s demand. What I am watching is Micron’s guidance on Wednesday night, the first hard number since the pause.
📈 A Fed governor says jobs can take another rise
“The labor market appears to be well positioned to handle an increase in rates.” Fed Governor Lisa Cook said that in Oakland on Monday. She voted for the September rise, and she expects the AI build-out and higher oil prices to keep pushing inflation up in the coming months. She put headline inflation on the Fed’s preferred measure at an estimated 3.8% in the year to August, with core at 3.4%. She does not expect AI productivity gains to arrive in time to offset that pressure this year. Federal Reserve
The bond market was already leaning her way. The 10-year Treasury yield closed at its highest since July 2007, around 5.24%. Futures put the chance of another quarter-point rise on 28 October at 72.5%, on CME FedWatch figures. Gold fell 4% to $4,114.93 an ounce, its lowest since 5 August. Bitcoin slipped to about $83,100 in Asian trading on Tuesday. Yahoo Finance
So why does the jobs market matter this week? Cook built her case on it. Unemployment was 4.1% in August, and she pointed to rising payrolls, more job openings and lower jobless claims. August job openings, the first test, land at 3pm UK, 10am in New York, with 7.23 million forecast after 7.27 million. PCE inflation follows on Wednesday. September payrolls land on Friday, with 100,000 jobs expected.
Sensei’s Insight: Cook is a governor, so she votes at every meeting. When a voter says the jobs market can take a rise, October comes down to whether Friday’s payrolls let her keep saying it. What I am watching is the unemployment rate, forecast at 4.2%.
🏛️ Anthropic’s prospectus: a $2 trillion goal, a $42 billion loss
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, is aiming for a stock market valuation above $2 trillion, Reuters reported on Monday, citing its IPO prospectus. That is more than double the roughly $965 billion it was valued at in May. Revenue rose 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion. It also booked a $42 billion net loss, and about $34 billion of that was an accounting charge on financing that can convert into shares. The listing is expected after the 3 November midterm elections. Yahoo Finance
Without that charge, the operating loss was still more than $8 billion. The company spent $7.33 billion on computing and infrastructure last year, 3 times its 2024 bill. It also listed $518 billion of cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations ahead. Nearly a quarter of its revenue came from 2 customers, it warned. About 80 of the filing’s 261 pages are risk factors, including warnings that advanced models can behave unpredictably, TradingKey reported. TradingKey
What is that $518 billion for? Cloud capacity, chips and data centres, bought from the same industry whose shares fell on OpenAI’s pause. One of the biggest buyers of computing power has committed to far more of it.
Sensei’s Insight: A $2 trillion listing would put a company that lost more than $8 billion on its operations in 2025 among the largest on the market. What I am watching is the customer list, because nearly a quarter of revenue sits with 2 clients.
🚀 Starship reached orbit, and SpaceX shares fell 2%
Did Starship make orbit? It did, on its 14th flight. The rocket left Starbase in Texas on Monday at about 8:50am in New York, 1:50pm UK. One of the ship’s engines failed on the way up, and it still made its orbit burn and released all 26 Starlink V3 satellites. They are the first Starlinks a Starship has put into orbit for everyday use. SpaceX then cut the flight short at its first scheduled checkpoint. The ship splashed down north of Hawaii just before noon in New York, 5pm UK, about 7 hours early. The company did not say why. ABC News
The shares went the other way. SpaceX closed down 2.16% at $145.47 on Monday, below $150, on a day the Nasdaq fell 0.92%. It added 0.42% after hours. SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot had told viewers the ship would not reach orbit after the engine shut down, before engineers cleared it to carry on. Deepwater’s Gene Munster said the market was “underappreciating the significance of the launch”. Benzinga
Monday’s issue set out 4 ways this flight could end. It ended with both main goals met, and the stock traded with the rest of tech. The next dates are about contracts and share supply. The deadline in SpaceX’s computing deal with Google falls on Wednesday 30 September. About 328 million shares come free from lock-up on 9 October.
Sensei’s Insight: Orbit, 26 satellites and a ship home on target, and the stock still fell. That tells me the price is trading the share supply ahead more than the rocket. What I am watching is 9 October, when about 328 million shares come free.