October 30, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
Yesterday’s Fed meeting offered something for everyone.
For bullish investors, the quarter-point rate cut provided a clear signal. And the Fed is just about done with its quantitative tightening.
But for the bears, Powell doused expectations that a December rate cut was 100% on the table.
October 29, 2025 • John Robb
In the past, weapon systems took decades to build and changed slowly. Autonomy changes this. For example, new capabilities developed by field tests or simulation (testing scenarios in full physics simulators depicting actual environments) could be downloaded to existing weapon systems, making it possible to upgrade a weapon system significantly without any meaningful hardware changes. A process of improvement that used to take many years would shrink to weeks and, in time, days.
October 29, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
Markets heard what they wanted. NVIDIA’s stock surged premarket on news that Trump would discuss the company’s Blackwell AI chip with Xi, pushing it to an unprecedented $5 trillion valuation.
Meanwhile, China quietly bought its first cargoes of U.S. soybeans this season — a symbolic gesture that reminded traders that diplomacy still runs on trade.
“It’s not détente,” wrote Bloomberg’s Jennifer Welch this morning, “It is a dealmaking with a timer.” Wall Street is ambivalent on peace, but they do like profits.
In the background, China’s biotech sector continues its ethically murky sprint forward — this week, reports surfaced of Chinese scientists creating monkeys engineered to exhibit schizophrenia and autism.
October 29, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
A high concentration of capital in a few stocks at the top ranks high among the features we detailed in Anatomy of a Stock Market Bubble.
On days like yesterday, headlines urge investors to buy. However, they also underscore the fragility of this terrifying bull market: just a handful of names can make the difference between a big up day and a big down day.
