Welcome to Markets Desk, here's what's moving right now.
Salesforce is in active talks to acquire AI startup Listen Labs for roughly two billion dollars, a significant premium over the company's last private valuation of five hundred million. Listen Labs sells an AI-driven market research platform, and the deal underscores just how aggressively enterprise software giants are deploying capital to own the AI toolchain before it matures.
Shifting to the tape, technical signals are flashing caution in the industrial real estate space. First Industrial Realty Trust crossed below its two-hundred-day moving average of sixty-one dollars and seven cents Wednesday, trading down about one point six percent on the session. That kind of break tends to draw systematic sellers, and with rate sensitivity still weighing on REITs broadly, the chart setup warrants watching.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are set to promote a congressional stock-trading ban at their midterm convention, even as the political optics grow complicated. President Trump disclosed more than twenty-one thousand trades executed in twenty twenty-five alone, and the House-passed restrictions being championed apply only to Congress, not the executive branch, leaving a fairly visible gap between the message and the policy.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
