New Records, Old News. Stocks shot to fresh highs on Monday, building on last week’s gains. All-time highs have become old hat to a market that’s seen the S&P 5oo notch nearly three dozen record closes this year, and the catalysts are familiar too: trade and tech.

Over the weekend high-level talks between U.S. and China officials in Malaysia led to a preliminary agreement largely focused on tariffs—to the point that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted the White House’s threat of 100% additional tariffs won’t be imposed.

That was music to investors’ ears ahead of President Donald Trump’s anticipated meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping on Thursday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 337 points, or 0.7% while the S&P 500 rose 1.2% and the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.9%.

With Trump and Xi’s meeting in Busan, Raymond James Washington Policy Analyst Ed Mills expects “to see another round of tariff suspension and de-escalation on issues such as rare earths export controls as a base case…The flurry of escalatory actions in recent weeks should largely be viewed through the lens of gaining leverage vs. a material desire to ramp up tensions.”

But that’s not all investors are cheering. Third-quarter earnings season is chugging on and, with roughly a third of the S&P 500 having reported, there are more earnings beats than usual along with upbeat commentary around the fourth quarter. It’s helped in no small part by tech and general bullishness around artificial intelligence. If the pattern holds through the remaining reports, third-quarter earnings growth could reach as high as 11%, up from an already strong 8% in the second quarter, estimates Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi, head of global equities at UBS Wealth Management.

This week is the most important stretch of the current earnings season, with five of the Magnificent Seven stocks—Google parent Alphabet, Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Microsoft—on deck to report results.

Laffer Tengler Investments CEO and CIO Nancy Tengler, who has been a tech bull since the summer of 2022, expects beats from the Mag 7 giants. If those beats aren’t enough to juice the stocks, then that will be a buy-the-dip opportunity, she says. “The tech trade will come off the boil at some point, but that is not now.”

Forget the kettle—at this point, investors might feel more like Champagne.

The Hot Stock: Qualcomm +11.1%
The Biggest Loser: Albemarle -8.9%

Best Sector: Technology +1.9%
Worst Sector: Materials -0.04%

All the attention on Big Tech’s earnings this week show that AI is still the hottest game in town, to the benefit of any company that can plug into it.

AI’s energy appetite is increasingly expanding, a fact that explains why the normally staid Utilities Select Sector SPDR Fund has soared more than 20% in 2025: Every company helping to keep the lights on at data centers offers investors another bite at the AI apple.

The trend was on full display Monday when ProPetro Holdings—an oilfield services company that’s lost over a quarter of its value this year—popped 14% after it struck a deal to provide power to a data center operator.

As my colleague Avi Salzman writes, “The move shows that investors are ready to reward any company that can provide electricity quickly, even if it isn’t its main source of business.”

Here’s more from Avi’s article:

When it comes to backdoor AI plays, though, the gains haven’t covered the entire energy sector. Oil prices remain in the red this year, and companies have pulled back on related expenses. The Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund is up just 3% in 2025.

But investors are willing to bid up individual energy players linked to AI—the thesis behind Barron’s recent bullish takes on Quanta Services and Expand Energy.

American Tower, A.O. Smith, Booking Holdings, BXP, Carrier Global, Corning, CoStar Group, D.R. Horton, Ecolab, Edison International, Electronic Arts, Equity Residential, Expand Energy, Hubbell, Incyte, Invesco, Iqvia, Labcorp Holdings, Mondelez International, MSCI, NextEra Energy, Novartis, Oneok, PayPal Holdings, PPG Industries, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Royal Caribbean Group, Seagate Technology Holdings, Sherwin-Williams, SoFi Technologies, Sysco, Teradyne, UnitedHealth, United Parcel Service, Veralto, Visa, Wayfair, Xylem, and Zebra Technologies report earnings tomorrow.

S&P Cotality releases its National Home Price Index for August. Home prices rose 1.7% year over year in July, the weakest rate of growth in two years. New York and Chicago were the strongest metro markets tracked by S&P, both increasing by more than 6%. Tampa and San Francisco were the weakest markets, with home prices falling by 2.8% and 1.9%, respectively, from a year earlier.

The Conference Board releases its Consumer Confidence Index for October. The consensus estimate is for a 93.4 reading, about one point less than in September.

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