Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving money and markets.
Equities are navigating a choppy session, with the S&P five hundred off by a fraction and the Nasdaq one hundred down nearly one percent, weighed by weakness in technology names. Higher crude oil prices are adding cost pressure across the tape, while the Dow is holding modest gains, carried by its more industrial tilt.
Shifting from the floor to the frontier of AI investing, Saturna Capital's Simon King is pointing investors toward base metals as an unconventional entry point into the artificial intelligence trade. The argument is straightforward: data centers and AI infrastructure demand copper, aluminum, and other materials in significant volume, and the miners supplying them remain far cheaper than the headline chip names.
And in a story that speaks to where productivity gains actually land, Anthropic's own employees are finding that Claude, their flagship AI model, compresses six hours of work into one — but the time saved hasn't translated into freedom. Instead, workers describe a new burden they're calling bot-sitting, managing and correcting automated outputs in ways that generate their own demands on attention and time.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
