Welcome to Markets Desk, your morning read on what's moving money.
National Australia Bank posted a nine percent rise in third-quarter net profit, coming in at one point eight one billion Australian dollars. That's a solid beat that signals the major Australian lenders are still navigating higher rates with relative resilience, even as credit conditions tighten across the region.
Turning to Europe, equity markets are seen opening broadly higher this Monday, with investors weighing two competing forces — geopolitical tension in the Middle East on one side, and fresh speculation about the Federal Reserve's next rate move on the other. Risk appetite is cautious but not absent, and early futures suggest buyers are willing to step in at these levels.
On the memory chip front, the case is building that this HBM cycle may have more staying power than prior semiconductor booms. High bandwidth memory demand is rising fast enough to absorb a meaningfully larger share of global DRAM capacity, and that supply constraint story is what separates this rally from the boom-bust patterns traders have been conditioned to fade.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
