Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk, your Friday wrap on the stories moving money and markets.
Tech stocks are taking a hard hit to close out the week, with US equities under pressure after earnings results stoked serious concerns about artificial intelligence spending. Intel is leading the damage, with shares on track for their steepest single-day decline since nineteen seventy four after the chipmaker's quarterly results rattled investor confidence across the semiconductor space. The broader worry is whether the enormous capital being poured into AI infrastructure will ever generate returns proportionate to the bet.
Staying in tech, ServiceNow's chief executive is making a bold claim, calling the company a unicorn in the enterprise software space after committing three million dollars toward a new initiative. ServiceNow built its business on the kind of back-office workflow automation most workers never think twice about, but the CEO is signaling that AI transforms that mundane foundation into something far more valuable at scale.
Rounding out the morning, commodity markets are finishing October on a softer note across the board. Corn is down two cents in early Friday trade, soybeans are showing fractional to two-cent losses, and live cattle futures slipped roughly a dollar in Thursday's session. Cash corn and soybean open interest movements suggest traders are squaring positions heading into month-end rather than making fresh directional bets.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
