The daily briefing

29 October 2026 | Information cutoff: 06:45 Europe/London Morning View The overnight earnings created a clearer hierarchy inside the AI trade. Microsoft combined 48% Azure growth, a $677bn commercial backlog and $18.6bn of free cash flow, while Alphabet more than doubled Google Cloud revenue but burned $9.07bn of cash and warned that capital expenditure will rise materially again in 2027. The market rewarded Microsoft and punished Alphabet because revenue growth…

28 October 2026 | Information cutoff: 06:48 Europe/London Morning View The overnight evidence shifted the AI debate back from financing structures to delivered earnings. SK hynix reported an 80% operating margin and said supply will remain structurally short through 2030, Seagate converted nearline scarcity into a 57.8% non-GAAP gross margin and record free cash flow, while Corning and Teradyne showed that optical connectivity and semiconductor test are compounding alongside accelerators.…

Morning View Tuesday, 27 October 2026. Information cutoff: 06:52 Europe/London. The overnight narrative shifted from whether AI demand exists to which balance sheets can finance it without destroying per-share returns. Meta Platforms launched an equity programme of up to $95bn, SpaceX secured a binding $40bn GPU finance-lease commitment, and Anthropic filed publicly for an IPO while disclosing extraordinary growth, losses and founder control. These are not isolated capital-markets events: they…