Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Oil markets are commanding attention after West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude posted their largest one-week percentage gains in months, with prices surging thirteen percent in just seven days. Traders are watching closely as some analysts now see a path toward triple digits, which would ripple hard through inflation expectations and central bank calculus globally.
Shifting from energy to technology, Chinese startup Moonshot AI has released an open-weight model called Kimi K three, and it is drawing serious attention in Silicon Valley. The model ranks competitively on coding benchmarks and signals that China's open AI development strategy is generating real pressure on American rivals at a moment when the competitive gap was already narrowing faster than many expected.
And in semiconductor equipment, ASML is drawing fresh bullish attention from analysts who say the Dutch chip gear maker is tracking toward its two thousand thirty revenue targets well ahead of schedule. That kind of execution, combined with its near-monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography, has some on the street asking whether the stock has a credible path toward three thousand dollars a share.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
