Strong Earnings Lift Markets | CPI Looms | Intel Surges | Google Lands Anthropic Deal

Stocks are coiled near records into September CPI. S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Dow futures all point to a higher open. 

The 10-year remains glued to 4%. The dollar and oil are flat and gold is giving back all of the ground it regained yesterday. They remained posed to react to the CPI print this morning.

Intel’s clean top-line beat and tighter supply talk lifted semis pre-market. Ford ticked higher on a solid quarter and plans to restore F-Series output. Deckers slipped on softer guidance. Procter & Gamble, HCA, and General Dynamics report before the bell.

Policy backdrop: the White House confirmed a Trump-Xi meeting for Oct. 30, supporting risk. A late headline that U.S.–Canada talks are “terminated” was largely faded by futures.

DEEPER READ: One Print, Many Narratives

With the shutdown still muting data, CPI has become the market’s proxy for policy. In-line core would keep the Fed on track to cut next week and preserve the soft-landing script. A hotter core risks a quick de-risking in momentum pockets and a pop in front-end yields. 

Earnings remain the secondary compass, with guidance doubling as inflation and demand reads.

Investor Signal

CPI sets the tone. In-line keeps the bid under quality growth and cash-rich cyclicals. Hot core favors a brief defense into healthcare, staples quality, and energy on supply risk.

Focus: core CPI’s 0.30–0.35 range, Intel’s demand color for PCs and data center, and P&G’s pricing and elasticity tells.

Positioning: lean into balance-sheet strength, keep some energy optionality, and use CPI swings to upgrade into names with pricing power and clean order books.

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Markets are flying half blind, but the view still looks clear enough to climb.

With the government shutdown freezing key data releases, corporate earnings have become Wall Street’s only compass. So far, it’s pointing higher.

Roughly 86 percent of S&P 500 companies that have reported have beaten expectations, led by Intel, Coca-Cola, 3M, and General Motors. 

The S&P 500 rose 0.6 percent Thursday and now sits within reach of new highs, proof that profits are still anchoring sentiment even as policy signals blur.

In the absence of payrolls, CPI, or spending data, investors are treating earnings calls as macro proxies. Margin commentary doubles as inflation guidance. Hiring trends are read like labor reports. Each forecast is doing the work of a government statistic.

Some of the biggest gains came from the most familiar places. GM jumped 15 percent after raising guidance. Dow Inc. climbed 13 percent despite a profit decline that was simply less bad than feared. Las Vegas Sands surged 12 percent as international demand returned. 

Even in a data vacuum, results like these tell a story of resilience, a private-sector narrative of stability.

DEEPER READ: Corporate America Becomes the New Bureau of Economic Analysis

The shutdown has forced markets into improvisation mode. Without official numbers, traders are parsing private signals and corporate disclosures to gauge the economy’s pulse. 

The takeaway so far: credit stress is isolated, not systemic, and consumer demand remains steady enough to keep earnings on track.

The risk lies in perception. When markets rely too heavily on earnings as macro indicators, sentiment can turn quickly once the illusion of stability cracks. 

The same data that now substitutes for economic guidance can become its casualty if a few high-profile misses flip the narrative.

Investor Signal

Strong results are holding sentiment together in a vacuum.

As long as earnings stay positive and credit fears remain contained, the market’s confidence will feed on itself. But with no hard data to check that optimism, each earnings call now carries more weight, and more risk, than usual.

This isn’t a rally powered by clarity. It’s one built on inference. The next miss could matter more than the next data point.

Corporate America is still spending, but not evenly.

The S&P 500’s total capital investment is on pace to top $1 trillion this year, the strongest showing in decades. But peel back the numbers and a different pattern emerges. 

Nearly all the growth comes from five firms, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, whose AI build-out has become both the symbol and substance of America’s expansion.

Outside that circle, the engine is sputtering.

Roughly half of the S&P 500 has cut capital spending this year. Automakers are scaling back as tariffs cloud supply chains. Food and consumer goods companies have trimmed budgets as households pull back. Even renewable-energy developers are reversing course as federal priorities tilt toward oil and defense.

The imbalance is striking.

AI’s top spenders are adding billions to data centers and power grids, while traditional industries hesitate amid policy shifts and uncertain returns. Factories, logistics, and utilities are benefiting from Big Tech’s appetite for compute, but the rest of the economy is watching from the sidelines.

DEEPER READ: The Two-Speed Expansion

At first glance, the economy looks unstoppable. Profits are up, rates are down, and business confidence has rebounded. But the capex divide shows how concentrated the recovery has become. One half of corporate America is building the digital frontier. The other is waiting for predictability before committing real capital.

That hesitation matters. Sustained growth depends on follow-through, not just on the few firms wiring the future. If non-AI investment continues to lag, the foundation beneath this bull market could narrow even as stock prices rise.

Investor Signal

The economy is running hot at the top and cautious everywhere else.

Watch for signs of catch-up spending from industrials, consumer firms, and energy producers. If that second wave of investment never comes, the trillion-dollar capex boom will remain an illusion, growth powered by a handful of balance sheets while the broader economy stands still.

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Intel just posted its first earnings beat since Washington became its largest shareholder, and investors are treating it as a vote of confidence in both the company and the country’s industrial policy.

Revenue hit $13.65 billion versus $13.14 billion expected, marking a return to profitability after six quarters of losses. But the bigger story lies in the structure: $8.9 billion of that stability came from the U.S. government’s 10 percent equity stake, negotiated in August as part of a broader national semiconductor push.

The arrangement has blurred the line between public policy and private enterprise. Intel’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, called the government “an essential partner,” reflecting a reality where the state is now both shareholder and stakeholder. 

Nvidia and SoftBank have joined the recapitalization, adding $7 billion combined and binding their fortunes to Intel’s turnaround.

Intel’s PC business is improving, but its foundry operation, the $100 billion bet to compete with TSMC, remains unproven. Yields are climbing but not yet at margin-sustaining levels. 

Tan admits it will take all of next year to get there. The company’s advanced “18A” chips are in production, but so far only for Intel’s own designs, not for outside clients.

DEEPER READ: National Security Meets Industrial Strategy

Intel has become the ultimate test of America’s bid to restore domestic chip leadership. Its success now depends as much on political will as technological execution. 

A $16 billion lifeline has bought time, but not certainty. Without major third-party manufacturing contracts, Intel’s foundry remains more a patriotic experiment than a commercial breakthrough.

Still, markets are betting that failure isn’t an option. The stock has nearly doubled this year, buoyed by faith that “too strategic to fail” now applies as much to silicon as to steel.

Investor Signal

Intel’s recovery is now a national project. The earnings beat proves stabilization, not resurgence. The next test is independence: whether the company can transition from state-supported survival to sustainable competitiveness.

For investors, Intel has become a geopolitical asset class, part tech stock, part industrial bond, priced on policy more than performance.

Alphabet’s cloud business just secured its biggest validation yet. Anthropic, the OpenAI rival founded by former researchers, signed a deal granting it access to one million of Google’s custom Tensor Processing Units, a commitment worth tens of billions and expected to add over a gigawatt of new compute capacity by 2026.

For context, that’s roughly the power draw of a midsized U.S. city, and the clearest sign yet that hyperscaler alliances are reshaping the infrastructure of artificial intelligence.

Anthropic’s move is both pragmatic and symbolic. Its Claude model family will now run across Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium chips, and Nvidia GPUs, a multi-cloud strategy designed for cost control, redundancy, and power efficiency. 

When an AWS outage rippled through the internet this week, Claude stayed online, proof of that design philosophy.

Google, for its part, gains credibility in a field long dominated by Nvidia. Its seventh-generation “Ironwood” TPUs deliver vertical power delivery for greater efficiency, and analysts say the Anthropic deal positions them as the first true alternative in high-performance AI training.

DEEPER READ: Compute as Currency

The Anthropic-Google partnership underscores how cloud capacity has become the real reserve asset of the AI economy.

Anthropic’s $7 billion revenue run-rate depends not just on model quality but on the availability and cost of compute. Its bet on diversified hardware mirrors a broader industry shift away from single-vendor dependence. 

For Google, the deal turns its TPU division from a captive tool into a competitive product, a cornerstone for future spinout value that some analysts peg near $900 billion.

The partnership also hints at a geopolitical realignment inside AI’s supply chain. Anthropic has sided with regulators calling for tighter chip-export rules, while Nvidia has resisted them. 

By deepening ties with Google, Anthropic is aligning its infrastructure with the side of the industry most comfortable under U.S. oversight, a quiet but meaningful choice.

Investor Signal

Google’s TPU business just evolved from an internal asset to a strategic export. The Anthropic contract doesn’t just sell compute, it sells confidence, proof that Google can compete with Nvidia and that Anthropic’s scale can rival OpenAI’s.

The winners in this phase of AI aren’t the loudest innovators but the ones locking in capacity early. Compute has become both the fuel and the moat.

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✓ Altcoin ETFs nearing approval
✓ Political momentum turning pro-crypto

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Ford’s third quarter proved that execution still matters, even when policy and luck don’t cooperate.

The automaker reported $2.6 billion in operating profit on record revenue of $50.5 billion, handily topping Wall Street’s $47 billion estimate. EPS came in at 45 cents, beating forecasts by a dime. But what made the quarter notable wasn’t just the beat, it was the resilience behind it.

Ford absorbed roughly $700 million in tariff costs and a devastating fire at aluminum supplier Novelis, which alone will cost up to $2 billion in lost production and higher sourcing costs. 

Even so, management said that without the fire’s impact, full-year guidance would have been raised to as high as $8.5 billion in operating profit.

Sales rose 8% year over year to 546,000 vehicles, led by F-series trucks and commercial units. The company plans to expand F-series production by 50,000 trucks in 2026 and add 1,000 jobs to recover output.

Its EV division remains a drag, but a smaller one. Per-vehicle losses narrowed to $28,000 from $38,000 last year. Meanwhile, Ford Credit delivered $631 million in profit, up 16%.

DEEPER READ: When Industrial Strength Becomes the Edge

The U.S. auto industry is navigating a paradox: tariffs and subsidy rollbacks have made cars more expensive and planning more uncertain, yet demand remains solid. 

Ford’s results, alongside GM’s strong showing, show that the winners are those balancing legacy profitability with measured electrification, not betting the house on it.

CEO Jim Farley’s pragmatic approach, cutting EV burn while doubling down on core segments, is paying off. The company isn’t immune to shocks, but it’s proving more adaptable than many expected.

Investor Signal

Ford’s beat wasn’t about optimism; it was about endurance. The market has rewarded that pragmatism, sending shares up 26% this year. Investors should watch how Ford allocates post-fire capital: expanding truck production, protecting margins, and slowly tightening the EV cost curve.

Ford’s story is less about reinvention than refinement, the quiet art of surviving a storm with the engine still running.

The market has now fully inverted its data hierarchy. Prices, guidance, and tone are doing the work of policy and statistics. CPI isn’t just an inflation read; it’s the last functioning heartbeat of a system that’s been running on inference for nearly a month.

Each sector is finding its own compass. Tech rides policy protection and partnerships. Industrials trade on proof of execution. Consumers move on faith that the floor will hold. And through it all, liquidity keeps underwriting belief.

The CPI print will decide whether this week closes as validation or repricing. If the number lands inside expectations, the market will treat it as proof the script still holds. 

If it doesn’t, the reaction will be less about inflation and more about exhaustion, a market that’s spent weeks acting like conviction was data itself.

By tonight, we’ll know whether investors still trust their instruments, or whether the signal’s finally gone quiet.