FOMC semi dovish. Alphabet and ServiceNow crater on earnings.

Today, the market ended Wednesday on a positive move as the FOMC proved semi-dovish, at least according to market impressions, while the vibe changed sharply after the close on Alphabet's earnings miss relative to expectations, though most of the sentiment damage seems limited. ServiceNow got fewer headlines but was down 18.5% on its earnings report, triggering contagion across SaaS stocks. Elsewhere, we break down the FOMC event yesterday, today's ECB and the focus on a successor for President Lagarde as she announced today she will leave her post in February. This and much more on today's pod, which is hosted by Saxo Global Head of Macro Strategy John J. Hardy.

Links

• John's The FX Trader from today (home.saxo/content/articles/forex/the-fx-trader…).

• Aswath Damodaran takes a stab at assessing Anthropic's market value, wild assumptions and all (linkedin.com/pulse/prospectus-arrives-my-anthr…), ahead of its IPO. Yes, the assumptions for his model inputs may prove way off, but once we know more in the quarters ahead, we can plug some of the new figures into Damodaran's still useful overall model. Other voices are certainly sceptical (x.com/UrbanKaoboy/status/2115502695641661952).

• The SCMP covers the EU weighing in on ditching Chinese suppliers (scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3372511/…), which European businesses are not happy about. Sovereign control of supply chains versus the hoping that China will remain a reliable supplier without imposing conditions - which side wins out?

• An Italian advisor to Italy's Ministry of Defence argues that critical mineral stockpiling would be a mistake and that countries need vertically integrated supply chains (x.com/TCommodity/status/2115678246251405638) to secure critical materials supply chains. (use Grok translate if you don't read Italiano).

• WSJ covers wild demand to take a very difficult, very classics- and fiction reading intensive Humanities 10 course at Harvard (wsj.com/lifestyle/harvard-class-humanities-32e…) - does this reflect a rebellion against what AI is doing to us all cognitively?

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