US markets ended the week with a relief rally after September’s employment report on Friday weakened the probability for another immediate Federal Reserve rate increase later in October. Nonfarm payrolls rose by just 29,000, while the unemployment rate rose up to 4.2%. July and August employment gains were revised down by a combined 60,000. Wage growth also fell to its lowest annual level since May 2021
Artificial intelligence is often described as an intangible revolution. Its near-term economic footprint, however, is strikingly physical. Training and deploying frontier models requires large quantities of specialised chips, electricity, cooling, network equipment, and purpose-built data centre capacity.
The memory industry has a habit of turning shortages into gluts. Demand for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which holds data while processors work, has historically followed spending on PCs, smartphones and servers. When prices rise, manufacturers invest in more capacity, which can arrive just as demand weakens. Factories still carry high fixed costs, leaving profits exposed when chip prices fall.
Most of the work on a trading idea goes into finding an edge. Much less goes into the second question, which is how much capital to put behind it, even though a good bet sized badly can still lose money. A simple experiment reported by Haghani and White [2] makes the point.
Building a data centre in Europe takes about two years. Connecting it to the grid can take five times as long, with waits of seven to ten years in the main hubs. For hyperscalers racing to add AI capacity, that wait is now the biggest obstacle, and it has changed what is scarce in European power no longer generation, but access to the grid.
Mexico’s government-bond curve presents an unusually steep front-to-intermediate structure, but the distinction between a steep macro curve and a locally cheap five-year bond has become increasingly important.
For much of the past decade, governments have borrowed for the long term at rates close to zero, with markets taking these conditions as close to a permanent feature rather than a temporary one. This assumption is breaking down. At the end of 2021, the 10-year and 30-year U.S. Treasury yielded 1.52% and 1.90%, respectively.
US markets spent the past week caught between a bond-market rout and a fresh AI-driven equity rally, with a de-escalating oil story easing the pressure by Friday. Wednesday, was the week’s real inflation point on the data front: the S&P Global flash PMI’s came in far stronger than expected. Manufacturing jumped to 57.0 from 53.9 (vs. 53.6 expected), Services rose to 58.7 from 56.5 (vs. 56.0 expected), and the Composite climbed to 58.4 from 56.0.
When lenders price a leveraged loan, they assess more than the borrower’s financial position and credit agreement. They also consider the private equity sponsor, which can influence how a portfolio company responds to distress and how aggressively it uses the flexibility contained in its loan documents.
This article is the first in Trading the Network, a seven-part series investigating whether relationships across financial assets contain predictive information that can ultimately be converted into tradable signals. Part I establishes the baseline by asking whether a simple network of historical return correlations
Salzgitter AG (SZG GR): BUY
Target Price EUR 70, 26% Upside, 12 to 18 Month Horizon
Note: this piece was written in September 2026 with the shares trading at EUR 55.65, which is the reference price behind every multiple and every per share figure below. Sell side estimates cited are Deutsche Bank.
Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous research agents in quantitative finance: they read briefs, write strategy code, evaluate simulator output, and propose refinements in a loop.
This week, the US equity market experienced considerable volatility, driven by oil prices, the Fed and AI safety concerns. At the start of the week, drone and shipping attacks near the Strait of Hormuz pushed WTI towards $106 per barrel by Tuesday, hitting equities. That revived inflation fears, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield up to near 5%. Additionally, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay on AI safety concerns…
The first space race raged between two economic superpowers one upping one another to demonstrate technological superiority. Half a century later, the space race is back on, however this time it is being led by privately owned companies rather than geopolitical superpowers.
Around the same time last year, we published our first article covering the Dutch Pension Reform and its potential implications on markets. The Dutch pension reform appeared to offer a relatively clear opportunity in European rates markets. As pension funds moved away from defined-benefit promises, their need to hedge ultra-long liabilities was expected to decline.