🚀 US stocks rise, led by Apple

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Market Overview
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Year To Date Performances:

1. U.S. stocks rallied Monday as optimism grew around an imminent end to the government shutdown, strong early earnings results, and Apple’s 4% surge to a record high following an analyst upgrade. The Dow climbed 516 points, the S&P 500 rose 1.07%, and the Nasdaq gained 1.37%, with Apple’s improving iPhone demand driving much of the momentum. Investors also took comfort in comments from the National Economic Council suggesting the 20-day shutdown could end this week, while anticipation of a potential Fed rate cut and upbeat earnings from companies like Netflix, Coca-Cola, Tesla, and Intel further lifted sentiment. Roughly 76% of early S&P 500 earnings reports have beaten expectations, fueling confidence that profits can offset macro headwinds such as tariff uncertainty and recent banking jitters. Meanwhile, easing U.S.-China tensions and signs of progress toward a trade deal added to the bullish tone, helping markets rebound from last week’s volatility.

2. The U.S. and Australia signed a critical minerals and rare earths agreement on Monday, outlining up to $8.5 billion in joint projects aimed at reducing dependence on China for essential materials used in defence, semiconductors, and electric vehicles. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the deal includes $1 billion in immediate investment, though a White House fact sheet later described a $3 billion commitment and $5 billion in potential financing backed by the U.S. Export-Import Bank. The partnership will fund multiple projects, including a Pentagon-backed gallium refinery in Western Australia involving companies like Alcoa and a joint venture with Japan. The move comes amid rising U.S.-China tensions, following Beijing’s new export controls on rare earths and Trump’s threat to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump said the deal marks a turning point in building a secure Western supply chain, adding that “in about a year, we’ll have so much critical mineral and rare earths that you won’t know what to do with them.”

3. Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage Monday that disrupted major sites, including Disney+, Reddit, Canva, and even Amazon’s own operations, before restoring full service by evening. The issue, traced to DNS problems in AWS’s U.S.-East-1 region, crippled popular tools like EC2 and DynamoDB and left warehouse workers, airlines, and banking apps temporarily offline. AWS said it was processing a backlog of data but confirmed all systems were operational by 6 p.m. ET, promising a detailed post-event report. The disruption underscored global reliance on just a few cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—with experts warning that the incident highlights how a single technical failure can ripple across the digital economy.

   Headlines

   1. Bitcoin rebounded above $111,000 yesterday.

   2. Trump is proposing a solution to the war in Ukraine that would see the country’s territory split.