Powell Pulls the Brake | Trump-Xi Hit Pause | Big Tech Splits on AI | Markets Face Their Moment

Markets finally got what they’ve been craving … calm … but not conviction.

After months of tariff tension and AI-driven exuberance, Thursday brought a rare double dose of restraint: a Fed that’s no longer promising cuts and two superpowers agreeing, briefly, to stop pushing each other off the economic cliff.

In Busan, President Trump and China’s Xi Jinping sealed a one-year trade truce that halves U.S. fentanyl-linked tariffs to 10 percent and delays Beijing’s rare-earth export limits. 

The handshake restored stability without solving anything. Both sides got breathing room: Washington eases pressure on inflation and farmers ahead of an election year; Beijing protects its export base and signals discipline to investors.

It’s a truce of necessity, not trust. 

The rivalry in chips, data, and AI remains existential … and no 100-minute meeting can rewrite that script. Xi called for “dialogue over confrontation.” 

Trump called the deal “a 12 out of 10.” Both know it expires in twelve months.

Back home, markets are processing the same theme in a different costume. Alphabet’s cloud and ad strength reinforced belief in AI’s staying power, while Meta’s $16 billion tax hit and Microsoft’s $3 billion OpenAI charge exposed the bill beneath the boom. 

Powell’s “not a foregone conclusion” moment reminded traders that the Fed wants proof, not hope.

Futures are soft, yields steady near 4.08 percent, and gold below $4,000 as oil hovers around $60 ahead of OPEC+. Europe is flat; Japan is catching its breath after five days of gains.

Investor Signal

This is a market rediscovering gravity. The trade truce lowers headline risk, not real risk. AI enthusiasm is maturing into capital discipline. And rate-cut certainty has given way to calibration. Stability now trades at a premium … and premiums, by definition, are paid up front.

Every cycle teaches the same lesson: calm isn’t comfort, it’s cost. The next rally won’t come from euphoria; it’ll come from execution. In this new phase, profit beats promise, and patience is positioning.

The 7 Stocks to Buy and Hold Forever aren’t just plays for the next quarter - they’re built to deliver for decades. 

These are blue-chip companies with fortress balance sheets, elite dividend track records, and the staying power to outperform in bull and bear markets alike. 

Some are Dividend Kings, others are on the path there, and all are proven wealth compounding machines. 

Download the full list now - before it disappears behind the paywall.

Alphabet just crossed the $100 billion quarter … and changed what that milestone means.

Revenue hit $102.35 billion with earnings per share of $3.10, both above estimates. Shares jumped 5 percent after hours, extending a 45 percent gain for the year. But the story isn’t the beat. It’s the blueprint.

Google Cloud surged 35 percent to $15.2 billion, backed by a $155 billion backlog that reads more like a national budget than a sales pipeline. 

Over 70 percent of its clients now use Google’s AI tools, and the Gemini platform has reached 650 million monthly users. That’s not experimentation … that’s infrastructure.

Alphabet lifted its 2025 capital-spending outlook to $91–93 billion and signaled “a significant increase” next year to keep up with compute demand. 

Data-center construction is now the company’s fastest-growing line item, eclipsing most nations’ energy budgets. Advertising remains the profit base … $74.2 billion in total, $56.6 billion from search, and $10.3 billion from YouTube … all up double digits even after a $3.45 billion EU fine.

Google’s model has become a feedback loop … infrastructure funds intelligence, intelligence fuels monetization, monetization finances more infrastructure. 

It’s no longer a tech company chasing trends; it’s a utility powering them. Margins now live where capacity lives.

Investor Signal

Alphabet’s results mark AI’s industrial phase. Growth depends less on invention and more on who controls the pipes … chips, data centers, and energy. 

With $155 billion in backlog and record capex ahead, Google’s cloud is now a macro variable. Investors aren’t betting on a product cycle; they’re buying a digital power grid.

Meta’s quarter delivered record growth and a reminder that scale still costs money.

Revenue rose 26 percent to $51.2 billion, with adjusted earnings of $7.25 a share beating expectations. 

But the headline was a $15.9 billion non-cash tax charge under President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act … an accounting hit that cut reported profit but lowers future tax payments. The result: strong fundamentals wrapped in messy optics.

Shares slid 9 percent as investors looked past the rebate to the bill. Capital spending more than doubled to $19.4 billion last quarter, with full-year guidance raised again to $70–72 billion. 

Total expenses will top $116 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed it as a wager on “superintelligence,” arguing Meta must “build significantly larger infrastructure” to compete.

Reality Labs lost $4.4 billion on $470 million in sales … another reminder that the metaverse still burns cash … yet the AI-powered Ray-Ban Display glasses sold out, and demo slots are booked solid. 

Behind the hardware, Meta is financing a $27 billion data-center venture with Blue Owl Capital and expanding new AI video features that have doubled app downloads in a month. Ad revenue of $50 billion and 3.54 billion daily users still fund the experiment.

Meta’s model now runs on belief: use a social-media ad engine to bankroll an AI arms race that may not pay off for years. The tax break buys time, not conviction.

The bigger question is whether Meta can monetize the infrastructure it’s building … or whether it ends up financing the rails that its rivals rent.

Investor Signal

Meta’s beat and tax hit cancel out; spending is the story. The five-fold rally since 2022 reflects faith in discipline, but that faith is now being tested. For now, Meta is spending like a cloud company without cloud margins. The payoff must shift from promise to profit… and soon.

Bitcoin just passed Amazon in total market cap — making it bigger than the company that made Jeff Bezos a household name.

But while most are blindly buying Bitcoin, veteran trader Larry Benedict is using a smarter strategy that could deliver gains 6x to 22x higher.

It's called "Bitcoin Skimming" — and if you want to actually profit from crypto's next move, you need to see this now.

Click here for the full story and how to get started.

The world’s two biggest economies hit pause … not peace. In Busan, President Trump and China’s Xi Jinping agreed to a one-year trade truce that halves U.S. fentanyl-linked tariffs to 10 percent and delays Beijing’s rare-earth export limits. 

The deal restores predictability without restoring trust … a cease-fire meant to manage headlines, not history.

Both sides won time, not territory. Washington gets tariff relief that cools inflation and helps U.S. farmers ahead of election season. Beijing protects its export base and postpones pain in its tech supply chains. 

The Commerce Ministry confirmed joint coordination on fentanyl, agriculture, and even the pending TikTok divestiture, proof that dialogue isn’t dead, just disciplined.

Yet the deeper fractures remain. Industrial policy, chip restrictions, and AI supremacy are still the real battlefield. The Busan meeting … 100 minutes long and heavy with optics … was more about narrative management than negotiation. 

Xi called for “dialogue over confrontation.” Trump called it “a 12 out of 10.” Both descriptions are true, and neither changes the score.

The détente reopens communication channels. Beijing gains stability for exporters; Washington trims price pressure for consumers. But the decoupling marches on. Semiconductor self-reliance, data localization, and AI control are still non-negotiables… and every year of truce only buys twelve months of preparation.

Investor Signal

Markets welcomed the pause but priced it for what it is: provisional. China’s rare-earth index rose 2 percent; soybean futures slipped 1.6 percent. Importers get short-term relief, not a supply-chain reset. The premium today is on predictability … and predictability, like peace, doesn’t come cheap.

Microsoft keeps breaking records…and running up the bill.
Fiscal-first-quarter revenue rose 12 percent to $77.7 billion, with adjusted earnings of $3.72 a share, both ahead of forecasts. 

Yet the stock fell 4 percent after CFO Amy Hood warned that capital spending will accelerate faster than planned this year and again in 2026.

Capex reached $34.9 billion in the quarter… well above estimates … as the company raced to add GPUs and CPUs to meet “accelerating demand.” Azure revenue jumped 40 percent, while Intelligent Cloud climbed 28 percent to $30.9 billion. 

The productivity segment, home to Office and LinkedIn, rose 18 percent, and personal computing edged 4 percent higher to $13.8 billion.

CEO Satya Nadella called AI adoption “the fastest enterprise shift since cloud computing,” citing explosive uptake of Copilot, Microsoft’s embedded AI assistant. 

Over 80 percent of new developers on GitHub now activate Copilot within a week. 

Still, capacity is the new constraint. “Demand remains significantly ahead of what we can serve,” Hood admitted. Analysts pressed on overbuild risk, but executives insisted the outlays are modernization, not excess.

Microsoft’s quarter exposes the physics of the AI boom: profit colliding with power. Cash flow of $45 billion gives it room to spend, but each new rack of GPUs raises exposure to energy costs and supply-chain strain. 

What began as a tech capex story now looks like a global industrial cycle…feeding utilities, chipmakers, and network suppliers from Arista to Bloom Energy. AI is no longer a software event; it’s an infrastructure economy.

Investor Signal

Microsoft remains the steadiest operator in big tech’s AI race, but the price of leadership is rising. As long as Azure outgrows rivals and Copilot keeps scaling, investors will fund the expansion. The constraint isn’t capital…or customers. It’s capacity. In the AI era, even abundance has limits.

When a U.S. ally tried to tax ONE American energy company...

Trump didn't hesitate to issue a direct warning.

Now this same company is generating over $3 billion in operating income...

And partnering with the hottest AI stock on Wall Street.

Out of 23,281 publicly traded stocks, this is the ONLY one that meets all the "unicorn" criteria.

Discover the energy unicorn here

The Fed delivered the expected cut … and an unexpected tone.

Rates fell a quarter point to 3.75–4.00 percent, and the balance-sheet runoff will stop December 1st. But Jerome Powell’s choice of words, “not a foregone conclusion,” landed louder than the move itself.

That phrase erased near-certainty of another cut this year, pulling odds from over 90 percent to roughly 65 and revealing real fractures inside the committee. Governor Stephen Miran dissented, pushing for a half-point; Kansas City’s Jeffrey Schmid wanted none. 

Powell admitted there are now “strongly different views” among policymakers … a rare public signal of division.

The challenge is context: growth remains solid, inflation stubborn at 2.8 percent, and job creation near zero. Some on the Fed see tariffs and immigration limits constraining labor supply; others warn that easing too far could reignite prices. 

With official data frozen by the government shutdown, the Fed is, in Powell’s words, “driving in the fog.” Ending quantitative tightening adds marginal liquidity but, he stressed, “isn’t a pivot.”

Powell’s credibility now rests on balancing consensus and caution. His term ends next spring, and the market senses the opening of a leadership transition. 

Rival camps are emerging … one favoring insulation, the other insurance. That split adds noise to every signal. For now, Powell is drawing a fragile line between flexibility and fragility: staying open-minded without sounding soft.

Investor Signal

Expect the yield curve to oscillate, not trend. Volatility in the 2- to 7-year zone should stay high as traders debate the length of this pause. Short-duration credit and cash-rich balance sheets remain the safe expression. 

The next decisive data point … whenever it finally arrives … will move policy faster than Powell’s words.

Markets open today in a new phase: from momentum to confirmation.
Powell’s “far from it” warning turned a presumed glide path into a live argument. 

Add Big Tech’s uneven results — Alphabet steady, Microsoft costly, Meta deflating — and the AI trade’s one-way certainty just fractured into nuance.

The rally still stands, but conviction doesn’t. 

The question isn’t whether growth is slowing; it’s whether disinflation and demand can coexist without the Fed’s guiding hand. Investors will be watching yields and credit spreads for early signs of policy fatigue or self-correction.

Trump’s handshake with Xi brings a dose of geopolitical calm, but only that … a one-year pause, not a partnership. The truce buys time, not confidence.

With Apple and Amazon reporting tonight, traders face the real test: whether mega-cap leadership can keep pulling risk higher while policy and profitability both enter gray zones. The day ahead isn’t about direction; it’s about definition … how much uncertainty the market can absorb before composure starts to crack.