Trump–Xi Summit Set; Oil Surges on Russia Sanctions

Stocks shook off Wednesday’s wobble as word that President Trump will meet China’s Xi next week pushed the tape higher: S&P 500 +0.6%, Nasdaq +0.9%, Dow +0.3%, with semis, megacap tech, and energy leading.

Crude ripped to its sharpest one-day gain since June after fresh U.S. sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil threatened to reduce global supply. Brent rallied 5.4% while WTI climbed +5.6%. Gold rebounded 1.5% and the 10-year ticked back to ~4.0% as rate-cut odds next week stayed firm.

Earnings remain a tailwind. Honeywell beat and raised and airlines firmed on guidance. Tesla clawed back losses despite a profit miss. Super Micro slid on a revenue shortfall, stoking credibility questions. 

Quantum names surged on stake-talk headlines even as Commerce said it’s not “currently” negotiating equity deals. Housing steadied: existing-home sales hit a seven-month high as mortgage rates eased and inventory improved.

DEEPER READ: Policy Hope > Policy Fear (For Now)

With the data pipe still kinked by the shutdown, the market is trading headlines as macro. A scheduled Trump–Xi sit-down eased tariff angst just as geopolitics elsewhere presented an oil shock risk. 

Tomorrow’s CPI arrives into a risk-on posture and a Fed inclined to cut, an asymmetric setup where “okay” inflation keeps the bid alive and only a hot print forces a rethink.

Investor Signal

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Binance Coin jumped more than 6% Thursday after President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the exchange’s founder and former CEO, closing a two-year legal saga that had defined Washington’s crackdown on digital assets.

Zhao, known as “CZ,” pleaded guilty in 2023 to failing to maintain an effective anti–money-laundering program and served four months in prison. The exchange paid $4.3 billion to settle Justice Department charges and was barred from operating in the U.S.

The White House cast the pardon as a reset. “The Biden administration’s war on crypto is over,” said press secretary Karoline Leavitt, framing the decision as both ideological and economic. 

The move follows a series of Trump-era reprieves for crypto executives and coincides with the explosive success of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial venture, a blockchain platform partly backed by Binance-linked investors.

Democrats immediately denounced the pardon. Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it “corruption in plain sight,” noting Zhao’s prior lobbying for leniency. Yet the markets read it differently: as the final stage of regulatory normalization for the world’s largest crypto exchange.

Zhao, posting from Abu Dhabi, said he was “deeply grateful” and vowed to help make America the “Capital of Crypto.”

Investor Signal
This isn’t just a legal headline, it’s a policy pivot. Washington’s posture toward digital assets is shifting from enforcement to integration. For investors, the signal is sentiment: crypto’s regulatory risk premium is collapsing. With Binance cleared to reenter the U.S., liquidity and legitimacy are back on the table, and with them, volatility.

Quantum stocks ripped higher Thursday even after the Commerce Department denied that the Trump administration was “currently” negotiating equity stakes in the sector. The phrasing, precise, temporary, and full of subtext, kept optimism alive.

IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave all traded significantly higher on the day as traders parsed currently like policy code. The denial didn’t erase the reporting that multiple firms were discussing at least $10 million each in federal funding for ownership stakes, it just reframed the timeline.

Behind the noise, Washington’s strategy is clear. The government has already taken 10% of Intel and 15% of MP Materials, marking a shift from subsidy to shareholder. 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick calls it simple fairness: if taxpayer money funds innovation, taxpayers should share the upside.

That logic is spreading. Quantum may still be years from commercial use, but it sits at the crossroads of defense, computing, and cryptography. A government stake would validate the field, and signal that frontier science now sits squarely inside industrial policy.

For now, “not currently” sounds less like rejection and more like choreography. The new Chips R&D office is already structured to issue equity, warrants, and revenue-sharing models. The debate isn’t if Washington invests, it’s when.

Investor Signal

The line between strategic capital and strategic ownership is fading. For traders, the takeaway is simple: policy denial isn’t disengagement. “Currently” just started the countdown to the next catalyst.

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Super Micro shares fell nearly 9% Thursday after the AI server maker warned that quarterly revenue would come in closer to $5 billion, well below its $6–7 billion forecast. 

The company blamed “design win upgrades” for pushing shipments into the next quarter, but for investors, it reinforced a longer-running concern: reliability.

Despite maintaining its full-year revenue outlook of at least $33 billion, analysts flagged a credibility gap. Raymond James said the miss “does not help build investor confidence,” noting that two-thirds of Wall Street estimates sit below management’s guidance. 

Super Micro has revised forecasts several times before, including multiple cuts to its 2025 targets and a downshift in its once-ambitious $40 billion 2026 goal.

The stumble comes at a sensitive moment for AI hardware sentiment. While Super Micro insists demand remains strong and its design wins are accelerating, competitors like Dell are reportedly gaining share among enterprise and tier-two cloud buyers thanks to financing advantages and steadier execution.

The message from the market: in a space built on precision, promises matter as much as performance.

Investor Signal

Super Micro remains an AI hardware bellwether, but its valuation assumes perfect delivery. Until management proves it can hit guidance consistently, expect volatility around every quarter. Traders should watch Dell as a relative winner and treat Super Micro’s pullbacks as trades, not holds.

Rivian is laying off more than 600 employees, about 4% of its workforce, in its latest effort to conserve cash and outlast the industry’s sharp EV reset. The move follows smaller cuts last month and comes as the company prepares to launch its lower-priced R2 SUV in 2026.

The layoffs underscore a new reality for the sector: the policy tailwinds that fueled the EV boom are gone. The expiration of the $7,500 federal tax credit has gutted near-term demand, forcing automakers to retrench and rethink scale.

Rivian’s third-quarter deliveries climbed 32% to 13,201 vehicles, but full-year guidance narrowed to 41,500–43,500 from as high as 46,000. 

The company has said it still holds enough cash to launch the R2, but profitability remains distant after a $1.1 billion second-quarter loss and $100 million in deferred regulatory credit revenue.

The broader message is one of consolidation, not collapse. Tesla remains self-funding, but even it faces margin compression. 

Legacy automakers are pausing new EV models. Rivian, still viewed as the cleanest pure-play on next-gen trucks, is choosing survival over scale, trimming now to buy time later.

Investor Signal

The EV story is transitioning from growth to endurance. Cost control, not production volume, is becoming the new metric of strength. Rivian’s cuts show discipline, not distress, but they also confirm what the market’s already whispering: the age of easy EV expansion is over.

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Home sales edged higher in September as mortgage rates dipped below 6.2%, offering the first signs of thaw in a long-frozen market. 

Existing-home sales rose 1.5% month over month to an annual pace of 4.06 million, the strongest in seven months, while supply climbed 14% from a year earlier.

Even so, affordability remains tight. The median sale price hit $415,200, up 2.1% from last year and more than 50% above pre-pandemic levels. Elevated prices and a limited 4.6-month inventory continue to favor sellers, particularly in high-end markets, where $1 million-plus homes saw 20% year-over-year sales gains.

Falling rates have drawn first-time buyers back, they now make up 30% of transactions, but a structural shortage of listings is capping momentum. The Mortgage Bankers Association expects the 30-year rate to hover above 6% through 2026, keeping prices mostly flat but stable.

Builders, meanwhile, are quietly resetting the cycle. New inventory and rate buydowns are reintroducing competition into overheated markets, while adjustable-rate mortgages are gaining favor again as buyers hunt for flexibility.

The bottom line: housing isn’t overheating or collapsing, it’s normalizing under a new ceiling.

Investor Signal

This recovery won’t come from lower prices, but from liquidity returning to the system. Watch for regions with fresh supply and builder incentives, they’ll lead transaction volume. For investors, steady rates and easing credit create a narrow but durable window for entry, not a boom, but a baseline.

The market’s mood shifted from fear of fracture to hope of détente. Traders saw a familiar pattern: policy tension releases risk, and energy shocks reprice it. Trump’s sanctions on Russian oil giants pushed crude into its strongest rally since June, just as word of his upcoming meeting with Xi hinted at trade relief. 

Together, they framed a day when pressure and optimism shared the same screen.

What mattered wasn’t the magnitude of the move but its message, capital still wants to believe in coordination, not conflict. Yet oil’s surge is a reminder that every act of diplomacy now carries a commodity cost. Tomorrow’s CPI print will test whether that optimism can coexist with higher input prices.

For now, risk is back on, but not because uncertainty disappeared, only because it found a price.