Daily briefing
Compiled before the Asia market open on Saturday, drawing on reporting from the 48 hours to Friday 25 September Hong Kong time; US and HK price levels reflect Friday's close, while mainland China markets, bonds, oil and crypto series update on a lag as noted below.
Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi handed US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner a written proposal at the UN for a regionwide ceasefire of up to 60 days and a phased reopening of the Strait of Hormuz; a senior Iranian security official warned Washington has only four to five days to accept it. Al Jazeera / The National
Dozens of delegations, including Arab and Muslim-majority states plus Colombia, South Africa and Indonesia, walked out as Netanyahu began his UN General Assembly address on Friday; he defended Israel's strikes on Iran and dismissed genocide accusations against Israel as 'the greatest lie of the century'. Al Jazeera / RTÉ
UAE's civil aviation authority halted Iranian carrier flights indefinitely after US Treasury threats of secondary sanctions on airports servicing Iranian planes; Iran retaliated by barring UAE-registered aircraft, including Emirates and Etihad, from its airspace. Al Jazeera / The National
Russia launched roughly 282 drones and missiles at Ukraine overnight; wreckage of Gerbera-type drones was found in Romania's Suceava county and Moldova's Floresti district, prompting Moldova to briefly close northern airspace and Romania to scramble F-16 jets. Kyiv Independent / Euromaidan Press
A nor'easter bringing gusts of 50-60 mph, coastal flooding of one to three feet above high tide, and dangerous surf is hitting the Eastern seaboard from North Carolina to New England, putting more than 40 million people in its path. NBC News / Fox Weather
The People's Bank of China will run overnight reverse repos capped at up to 1 trillion yuan (about $149 billion) a day from 28 September to 8 October to cover holiday cash needs, after separately conducting 800 billion yuan in medium-term lending facility operations on Thursday. Bloomberg / China gov.cn
China's securities regulator penalised Guosheng Securities (a 290,000 yuan fine plus a combined 810,000 yuan against six executives) and Xiangcai Securities (a warning plus a combined 1.25 million yuan against executives), barring both from opening new accounts for three months. 21st Century Business Herald / Sina Finance
China's cyberspace regulator is investigating whether DeepSeek and Moonshot AI secretly forwarded user requests to Anthropic's Claude, after Anthropic reported more than 23 million Moonshot-linked exchanges and 12 million-plus DeepSeek-linked exchanges, some involving sensitive material such as surveillance footage near PLA facilities. Bloomberg / The Information
The Securities and Futures Commission ordered HKEX to suspend trading in Silver Grant International after finding roughly 63% of HK$2 billion in unsecured loans issued between 2021 and 2023 was suspiciously routed to the firm's then-major shareholder and related parties. The Standard
The Department of Justice filed a sentence review calling the original terms 'manifestly inadequate' for a former officer and three inmates over a retaliatory attack that caused severe internal injuries to a remanded teenager who had thrown baby powder at a guard. The Standard / Hong Kong Free Press
A modernised EcoPark facility in Tuen Mun, running since late July, will end the city's reliance on waste-paper exports and expand accepted categories beyond cardboard and newspaper, lifting recovery capacity from about 500,000 to 720,000 tonnes a year. The Standard
Wall Street closed out a volatile week on a firmer note. The S&P 500 rose 0.51% to 7,743.41 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.5% to 27,068.72 on Friday, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 478.64 points, or 0.93%, to 51,828.62 as investors shrugged off this week's bond-market turbulence. The 10-year Treasury yield, which had spiked to a post-2007 high near 5.18% on Thursday on hawkish Fed commentary and strong business-activity data, was little changed at around 5.17% on Friday.
Microsoft was the standout single-name mover, jumping about 4% to close at $516.17, its highest level of the year, after unveiling an expanded Copilot with a unified 'Home' interface, new code-generation and agentic tools, and an enterprise-focused pivot; Oppenheimer raised its price target to $570 on the news. AMD extended its rally to $630.63, holding above the $1 trillion market-cap threshold it crossed on 21 September and becoming the fourth US chipmaker — after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron — to reach that level, having nearly tripled in value this year. Micron closed at a fresh record of $1,082.28 ahead of fiscal fourth-quarter results due 30 September, even as Wells Fargo trimmed its price target to $1,400 from $1,525 on valuation grounds while raising its earnings estimates. Nvidia ($225.07), Broadcom ($350.36) and TSMC ($450.61) were comparatively subdued, while Palantir eased to $189.67 from a record above $192 earlier in the week.
Hong Kong shares fell for a third straight session, with the Hang Seng Index down 1.01%, or 251 points, to 24,510.09 on Friday on thin turnover, as investors judged the Trump-Xi trade-truce extension to 10 January 2027 too brief to mark a durable breakthrough. Mainland Chinese markets were closed Friday through Sunday for the Mid-Autumn Festival; the last available prints showed the CSI 300 down 1.7% and the Shanghai Composite down 1.2% on Thursday, their worst one-day falls in a month.
Bitcoin held around $84,400, off a 21 September peak near $86,600, while ether traded near $2,687, down from about $2,776 earlier in the week. Gold, tracked here via the GLD ETF, slipped to $391.69 on Thursday as elevated Treasury yields continued to dull the appeal of non-yielding assets; broader gold-price gauges put bullion closer to $4,280 an ounce, near its lowest level since early August.
Oil remains volatile and our WTI series runs a few days behind: the last print in our feed, for Tuesday 22 September, showed crude at $96.41. Subsequent reporting indicates WTI has since eased to around $93 a barrel and Brent to around $105-106, as markets weighed both the prospect of a phased US-Iran deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's new four-to-five-day deadline for Washington to accept its ceasefire roadmap.
| Name | Last | 1 day | Move | Volume | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equities & semis | |||||
| NVDANvidia | $225.07 | +0.22% | 0.7x avg | 09-25 | |
| AVGOBroadcom | $352.81 | +0.70% | 0.6x avg | 09-25 | |
| MSFTMicrosoft | $516.17 | +3.66% | 1.8x avg | 09-25 | |
| PLTRPalantir | $189.67 | -1.52% | 0.6x avg | 09-25 | |
| TSMTSMC | $450.61 | -0.12% | 0.7x avg | 09-25 | |
| MUMicron | $1,082 | +0.16% | 0.8x avg | 09-25 | |
| XYZBlock | $76.42 | -0.42% | 0.8x avg | 09-25 | |
| SOFISoFi | $16.58 | -1.31% | 0.7x avg | 09-25 | |
| AMDAMD | $630.63 | +0.22% | 0.8x avg | 09-25 | |
| Crypto | |||||
| BTCBitcoin | $84,385 | +0.01% | 1.1x avg | 09-24 | |
| ETHEthereum | $2,687 | +0.13% | 0.9x avg | 09-24 | |
| Commodities & rates | |||||
| XAUGold (GLD ETF) | $393.41 | +0.44% | 0.6x avg | 09-25 | |
| WTICrude oil (WTI) | $96.41 | -0.58% | — | 09-22 | |
| US10YUS 10-year yield | 5.18% | +7 bp | — | 09-24 | |
| Name | Reports | When | Period | Consensus EPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOFISoFi | Tue 27 Oct est. | in 4 weeks | Q3 FY2026 | — |
| MSFTMicrosoft | Wed 28 Oct est. | in 5 weeks | Q1 FY2027 | — |
| PLTRPalantir | Mon 2 Nov est. | in 5 weeks | Q3 FY2026 | — |
| AMDAMD | Tue 3 Nov est. | in 5 weeks | Q3 FY2026 | — |
| XYZBlock | Thu 5 Nov est. | in 6 weeks | Q3 FY2026 | — |
| TSMTSMC | Fri 13 Nov est. | in 7 weeks | Q3 FY2026 | — |
| NVDANvidia | Wed 18 Nov est. | in 8 weeks | Q3 FY2027 | — |
| AVGOBroadcom | Thu 10 Dec est. | in 2 months | Q4 FY2026 + full year | — |
Dates marked est. are projected from the same quarter last year because the company has not confirmed one yet. "+ full year" means the release carries annual results, not just the quarter.
OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei separately addressed the UN Security Council, with Amodei warning AI 'could be a risk to humanity as a whole' and proposing a ban on AI-enabled bioweapons work plus a global incident-notification system, while Altman called for international standards on measuring capabilities and preserving human oversight. CNN / Bloomberg
Beijing's cyberspace regulator is investigating claims from Anthropic that DeepSeek and Moonshot AI secretly forwarded millions of user exchanges to Claude and used the results to train their own models via distillation, with officials visiting both companies' offices. Bloomberg / The Information
Anthropic's biology team reports Claude autonomously identified a previously undescribed 'array-associated reverse transcriptase' system in bacteriophage DNA after screening about 200,000 enzyme clusters over 21.5 hours using 949 agent sessions; CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang called the finding 'genuinely intriguing'. Anthropic
DeepMind's Koray Kavukcuoglu said Gemini 4 is in early post-training and expected before the end of the year, as Google works to respond to Anthropic's Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 launches. Gurufocus
AMD shares closed at $630.63, up nearly 194% this year, sustaining the $1 trillion valuation it first reached on 21 September on the back of its multi-gigawatt GPU supply deal with OpenAI and a tie-up tied to its new MI450 chip. CNBC / 24/7 Wall St