Major indices are rallying across the board as bond yields and oil edge lower. Notably, the tech heavy Nasdaq is in the lead.

Energy (XLE) is lagging as oil moves lower, while the more defensive sector of Consumer Staples (XLP) is slightly below its baseline as investors go more risk on. Communication Services (XLC) is at the top of the leaderboard, getting a large boost from Meta Platforms (META) after the company unveiled Petal, a roughly 7,000 km subsea cable between the U.S. and France designed to carry 1 petabit per second when it enters service in 2029, about double the capacity of today's most advanced transoceanic cables. Meanwhile, Technology (XLK) is the runner up as both software and semiconductor names get a boost. Notably, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) crossed $1 trillion in market capitalization.

Marvell Technology (MRVL) is one of the best performing stocks in the Technology (XLK) sector. The company will demonstrate its industry-first 2nm optical interconnect technologies at ECOC 2026, including a co-packaged optics platform that integrates optics directly with AI accelerators and switch silicon, as hyperscalers push for higher bandwidth and lower power per bit to link ever larger clusters of GPUs, CPUs, accelerators, and memory.

The Tale of Two AI Giants

OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly neared a legally binding agreement earlier this year that would give each lab API access to the other's commercially available models to independently test for vulnerabilities and hidden safety risks.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly building agent features that can run nonstop in the background and carry out multistep tasks across connected apps and has also discussed a separate personal AI assistant. Behind the scenes, its own AI now does much of the heavy lifting on new experimental models, from writing GPU kernels to running weeks of testing with minimal human oversight, turning some projects that once took years into roughly a week.

In other news, Coinbase (COIN) is opening IPO access to eligible U.S. retail customers, letting them put in for shares at the IPO price ahead of the first trade, starting with Oura's upcoming debut, though fills aren't guaranteed and an anti-flipping rule can shut out investors who dump shares within 30 days from future offerings.

Trump & Xi Preview

Washington has reportedly offered a six month extension of its trade truce with China, while Beijing is holding out for a longer arrangement, as Xi Jinping heads to the White House to meet President Trump on Thursday ahead of the truce's November expiration.

Also coming ahead of the meeting, President Trump took to Truth Social to dismiss AI doomsday warnings as a hoax, casting AI as a bigger shift than even the Industrial Revolution or the Internet. He asserted the U.S. is ahead of China in the AI race and vowed to encourage rather than stifle its growth, while noting the Department of Justice and other law enforcement bodies can rein things in if needed.