What moved
- US (closed Monday): S&P 500 +1.49% to 7,764.70; Nasdaq Composite +2.26% to 27,122.09, now 0.25% below its 52-week high; Dow +0.71% to 52,048.83. S&P 500 futures are flat at 7,835.25 (+0.02%) and Nasdaq 100 futures -0.03%, so the overnight read on the US day is neutral.
- Europe (closed Monday): FTSE 100 +0.75% to 10,739.01; DAX +1.07% to 25,575.01; CAC 40 +0.92% to 8,138.94; Euro Stoxx 50 +1.31% to 6,318.20.
- Asia (live): Hang Seng +0.19% at 25,089; Shanghai Composite +0.06% at 3,952; Kospi +0.44% at 7,038.79. Tokyo is closed for a three-day holiday run, so the Nikkei's last print is Friday's 65,018.95.
Why
Monday's move was a chip story with an oil tailwind. Meta's Muse, an AI agent launched earlier this month that books travel and manages purchases rather than just chatting, has held the top spot among free iPhone apps in the US for three straight days on Sensor Tower data. The market read that as evidence that agentic workloads are arriving faster than expected, and because agents lean on inference, planning and orchestration, they need more CPU per unit of compute than GPU-heavy training does. That is why the CPU names led: Arm closed +17.16% at $322.90, Intel +12.14% at $121.78, and Meta itself +11.34% at $741.25. The rally broadened across the software and data-centre supply chain (Astera Labs +12.36%, Akamai +12.33%, DigitalOcean +12.31%) and into Europe's chip complex, where ams-OSRAM rose 22.93% in Zurich and Soitec 9.82% in Paris.
The second leg was crude. Brent is trading at $97.86, down 2.47%, and WTI at $93.78 (-2.09%), with the 5-day declines at -7.53% and -8.44% respectively. The driver is hope that this week's UN General Assembly gives US-Iran diplomacy a chance: President Trump said he would be open to meeting Iranian President Pezeshkian in New York, and Saudi shipments are partially recovering despite continuing Houthi attacks. Cheaper oil pulled the 10-year Treasury yield down 3.5bp to 4.963% and the 30-year 3.5bp to 5.296%, easing the two pressures that had weighed on equities into last week.
The loser was the obesity trade. Novo Nordisk fell 7.65% in Copenhagen to DKK 260 after its capital markets pitch, five-plus blockbuster launches by 2030 and more than $23bn of risk-adjusted pipeline sales by 2035, was judged too vague to answer the semaglutide patent cliff from 2032 and Lilly's 61% share of the market.
Sentiment & risk appetite
Risk appetite is high but concentrated. The VIX sits at 14.87 and the MOVE at 81.2, neither signalling stress, and gold is off 0.7% at $4,353 while copper is +1.77%, a growth-over-hedge mix. But the tape was narrow: on PrimerIQ's US universe only 3,229 names advanced against 2,608 decliners (ratio 1.24) on a day the Nasdaq added 2.26%, and sector dispersion was wide, with Communication Services +3.56% and Technology +2.77% against Energy -2.88%, Utilities -1.07% and Staples -1.06%. Our UK universe was far broader, with advancers outnumbering decliners 532 to 250. The dollar index is steady at 100.47, USD/JPY is +0.38% at 157.64 with Tokyo shut, and sterling is 1.3372.
Economic calendar
No UK statistical release was scheduled for this morning, so the 07:00 window was corporate rather than macro. The US day is light on data and heavy on Fed voices: the Richmond Fed manufacturing and services surveys at 15:00 BST (10:00 ET), then New York Fed President Williams at 15:05 BST, Governor Jefferson at 15:20 BST and Richmond's Barkin at 18:00 BST, alongside a 2-year Treasury auction at 18:00 BST and API crude inventories at 21:30 BST. The bigger scheduled prints, September flash PMIs for the US, eurozone and UK, come tomorrow. The unscheduled item that matters most is the UN General Assembly in New York, where any sign of a US-Iran meeting would move crude first and rates second.
Earnings
Novo Nordisk is the result that has already been marked: its strategy update on Monday sent the shares down 7.65% because the growth framing was 'in line with peers' rather than the premium investors were used to. In the US, GRAIL's 33.68% jump followed FDA staff briefing documents that raised no major concerns about its Galleri multi-cancer test ahead of Wednesday's advisory panel. This morning's London 07:00 releases are in the market and the table below carries the names; the share reactions come at 08:00.