NORTHWARDBy Prajwal Giri
Markets
Stocks were mixed heading into Thursday's session after the Dow closed at a fresh record of 54,349 on Wednesday, even as the S&P 500 slipped 0.2%. Futures ticked higher Thursday morning — Dow futures up 0.2%, S&P 500 futures up 0.1% — while Nasdaq-100 futures dipped 0.1% as investors weighed a fresh wave of earnings against weekly jobless claims data. Initial claims came in around 197,000, continuing claims fell to 1,782,000, and ADP data showed wages for job-stayers up 4.4% year-over-year.
Oil extended its slide after Iran and Oman said they'd reached an agreement on a proposed Strait of Hormuz shipping route, with officials signaling a broader US-Iran deal could be announced within days. Brent and WTI have both fallen sharply this week on hopes the strait fully reopens to normal traffic.
Earnings were a mixed bag: AMD fell sharply despite beating estimates, Disney rose nearly 5% on a profit beat and a new $9 billion buyback plan, Shopify surged about 27% on an earnings beat and strong forward guidance, and Uber dropped more than 3% even as gross bookings rose 22% year-over-year.
Tech
Meta launched Muse Code, its first AI coding agent, built on its in-house Muse Spark 1.2 model and undercutting Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex on price — $1.25 and $4.25 per million input/output tokens, with a $0.30-per-million "contributor tier" that trades cheaper pricing for training rights to your code.
Google DeepMind underwent a leadership shake-up: Demis Hassabis stepped down as CEO to become Alphabet's Chairman and Chief Scientist, with CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over daily operations, while 27-year Google veteran and chief scientist Jeff Dean is departing to launch a Google-backed startup, Discovery Loop, focused on automating large-scale machine learning experiments.
Not financial advice — for informational purposes only.