Good morning,

It is the first official day of fall, confirmed by the weather outside. Yesterday was a reasonably quiet session with major indices closing on either side of unchanged consolidating the gains of Monday’s Meta Muse motivated rally, that’s a lot of M’s. AI chips/memory/hardware continued to outperform while the AI disruption trade took a new twist with fears that AI agents could disrupt wealth management, traditional brokerage businesses, payments processors and online travel companies. The financial sector was the worst performing within the S&P 500 falling 2% while energy and communication services were both down 1%. Materials and consumer staples were both up >1%. President Trump gave a wide-ranging speech at the UNGA. Late in the session he acknowledged hat US officials met with an Iranian delegation suggesting that it went well. Oil prices fell for the fifth consecutive session with ICE Brent breaking below $100.

It’s been a very quiet overnight session as markets await the arrival of President Xi in Washington this afternoon and Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at Meta’s Connect conference after the close. However, there is some buzz on the floor as the First Lady will be ringing the opening bell. Oil prices and yields were modestly lower overnight putting a bid in equity futures. Oil/yields started to reverse around 6:30 this morning and equity futures have followed suit turning slightly lower. Quantum stocks are in focus this morning after IonQ (+>10%) demonstrated the first end-to-end real-time quantum error correction decoder. Worthington Enterprises and Cracker Barrell are both trading higher after earnings while Paychex is under pressure after its results.