It has been a week to remember with the S&P 500 going from a near correction to a new all-time closing high. The index is on track for its third week of +3% gains, which have only happened twice since 1950.

For the Nasdaq 100, this has been the strongest start of April in almost 40 years.

Ten sectors are trading higher with Consumer Discretionary (XLY) leading, as gains across cruise line names and airlines are near double digits and mega-cap names are showing solid gains today. Communication Services (XLC) is facing pressure from Netflix (NFLX) following its earnings report.

Good Start

Q1 earnings season kicked off this week and of all the major Financial (XLF) companies that reported so far, all but Wells Fargo (WFC) surpassed earnings and sales consensus. Bank earnings are not the main story in the market right now, but given the fact they were relatively strong, it serves as a solid footing for the rest of the earnings season.

AI Update

Anthropic launched Claude Design, aimed for creating visual assets, slides, prototypes and one-pagers with Claude. It is in research preview, and available for paid Claude subscribers.

The Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek, is in talks to raise at least $300 million at a valuation of $10 billion. The move reflects competition heating up in the industry.

Nvidia (NVDA) released PhysicsNeMo, an open-source AI framework designed to speed up nuclear reactor designs through physics-based simulation. This framework fits into the U.S. Department of Energy’s push for AI-powered reactor design tools. 

Have a great weekend!