Welcome to Markets Desk, here's what's moving right now.
Silicon Valley is placing its biggest physical bet yet. Robotics and physical AI companies have pulled in more than twenty-three billion dollars this year alone, with Nvidia unveiling a humanoid robot blueprint and OpenAI aggressively expanding its robotics team. The message from the valley is clear — the era of talking AI is giving way to moving AI.
Shifting to the pits, cattle futures rebounded firmly on Monday with live cattle posting gains of seventy-five cents to just over two dollars across the board, and feeder cattle climbing as much as three dollars and sixty-two cents. That strength came despite softer cash trade last week, where prices ranged from two hundred fifty-five to two hundred fifty-eight dollars nationally. Hogs told a different story, with most contracts finishing lower by as much as a dollar twelve, though the national base price edged up sixty-three cents to ninety-three dollars and eighty-six cents.
Meanwhile, Cognizant's CEO is pushing back hard against the AI displacement narrative. Ravi Kumar is hiring more than twenty thousand graduates this year, calling token output a vanity metric and arguing that the loudest doomsday predictions about entry-level white-collar jobs were simply wrong — a view that's gaining traction as even Sam Altman and Dario Amodei walk back their earlier warnings.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
