Capital Markets

S&P Global announced on September 17, 2026 that it has acquired OpenZeppelin, the industry standard for smart contract security, in a move that extends the ratings firm's risk-assessment mandate into the technology-risk layer of digital assets. OpenZeppelin's libraries underpin over $37 trillion in cumulative transfers and power 8 of the top 10 stablecoins, including USDC, and 10 of the top 10 tokenized money market funds, such as BlackRock's BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's BENJI. OpenZeppelin will operate as a separate business unit led by CEO Demian Brener, who will report directly to Yann Le Pallec, President of S&P Global Ratings. The deal lands on the same day the SEC granted a 5-year exemption for tokenized NMS stock trading, aligning with the broader GENIUS Act framework, and ahead of the DTCC Tokenization Service launch in October 2026. S&P Global is positioning itself as the gatekeeper of the technical standards regulators are expected to require for tokenized markets.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission introduced a provisional, conditional exemption allowing certain tokenized U.S.-listed equities to trade on-chain under specified conditions, while S&P Global agreed to acquire OpenZeppelin, a firm specializing in smart contract security infrastructure. The SEC measure, set out in a "Statement on Innovation Exemptions" signed by Commissioner Mark T. Ueda, guarantees holders of equity tokens the same rights as holders of conventional shares and requires third parties to notify the issuer of the underlying stock in writing before dealing in tokenized shares. According to S&P Global, OpenZeppelin's technology has supported the transfer of more than $37 trillion in value cumulatively, including major stablecoins and tokenized funds. Following these announcements, the market capitalization of DeFi-related tokens rose about $7 billion on Friday, climbing 8.8% to $79.8 billion, while the total market capitalization of the broader crypto market rose 4% to $2.7 trillion. Hyperliquid's HYPE jumped 10.8% to an all-time high of about $90.46, giving it a market capitalization of $20.12 billion; Uniswap's UNI rose 29.1% over 24 hours to about $9.00, for a market capitalization of $5.59 billion; and Aave's AAVE gained 9.5% to about $135.28. Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said the SEC is trying to put in place as much of a crypto regulatory framework as it can under its existing authority, and described tokenization as a massive tide.

The SEC announced a five-year conditional Innovation Exemption allowing eligible platforms to trade tokenized U.S. equities without standard exchange registration, sending shares of Robinhood up 7.6% and Coinbase up 10.5%. According to Reuters, the temporary framework lets digital asset brokerages and trading platforms support tokenized equity trading while the agency solicits public comments to shape permanent regulatory policies for on-chain securities. Tokenized equities represent traditional corporate shares as digital tokens on a blockchain, potentially enabling 24/7 trading, fractional ownership, and more efficient settlement. The move reduces compliance hurdles and waives full exchange registration requirements for qualifying participants, opening the door for platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood to launch new asset offerings and capture additional trading volume. The rally was further supported by a rebound in the broader cryptocurrency market, with Bitcoin trading up roughly 2% near $78,000. Coinbase remains down 17.7% since the start of the year and trades at $194.63 per share, 49.7% below its 52-week high of $387.27 from October 2025.

IREN's fair value estimate has been trimmed from US$80.93 to US$79.03, a modest adjustment reflecting a mix of growing AI cloud contracts and ongoing questions around execution and supply build out through 2027. The revision lifts revenue growth assumptions to 168.01% from 125.79% and net profit margin expectations to 11.73% from 5.79%, while the future P/E assumption drops to 31.26x from 90.29x and the discount rate rises to 9.41% from 8.83%. On the bullish side, JPMorgan shifted IREN from Underweight to Overweight with a US$65 price target, citing a partnership with Nvidia, new customer signings and higher industry pricing, while H.C. Wainwright raised its target to US$90 after IREN announced US$2.8b of new multi year AI cloud contracts and lifted its 2026 AI cloud annual recurring revenue target to more than US$4b. Northland initiated IREN at Outperform with a US$99 price target, and Freedom Capital upgraded the stock from Hold to Buy. Freedom Capital nonetheless flagged execution on supply additions over the next two years as a central risk, noting the story depends heavily on adding capacity on schedule.

Coinbase Global has filed for regulatory approval to list perpetual futures tied to individual large-cap U.S. stocks, opening the door to 24/7 leveraged trading of shares such as Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia on a regulated U.S. platform. The exchange plans to offer contracts linked to roughly 50 to 60 major stocks, with trading potentially starting later this year if regulators approve the products, according to The Wall Street Journal. Coinbase submitted a Form 1-N to the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month, a filing that allows Coinbase Derivatives to register with the SEC as a national securities exchange for security futures products. The move follows Coinbase's push to expand perpetual futures beyond crypto; the exchange launched stock perps for eligible customers outside the U.S. in March, and earlier this month launched regulated crypto derivatives for eligible Canadian traders, offering 23 crypto futures tied to assets including Bitcoin, Ether and Solana, alongside futures for gold, silver, oil and the COIN50 index. U.S. regulators have also taken steps this year to open the market to perpetual contracts, with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approving a bitcoin perpetual futures contract submitted by Kalshi on May 29 and saying market participants could seek approval for other perpetual products. Coinbase is not alone in seeking to bring the products into the U.S. regulated market, as Kalshi has also moved toward offering single-stock perpetual futures.

Northland Capital initiated coverage of IREN Ltd. at Outperform with a $99 price target, implying more than 100% upside from the prior close, and the stock rose 1.82% premarket on the call. The bullish initiation adds to an analyst base already skewed positive, with 14 buy ratings and three holds before today. The move follows JPMorgan's September 14 upgrade of IREN two notches from Underweight to Overweight with a $65 target, citing its Nvidia cloud partnership and neocloud pricing power. IREN has retired lower-margin Bitcoin mining hardware to redirect power toward AI compute, taking a large non-cash impairment in its fiscal 2026 results while lifting its contracted annual recurring revenue target to $4 billion for 2026.

Bitcoin traded at $80,888.81, up 5.5% over 24 hours, pushing crypto-linked equities sharply higher Friday morning. Strategy stock rose 12% to $148.55 and Coinbase Global shares climbed 11% to $192.43, both outpacing the coin itself, while the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF gained 6% and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust slipped 0.1%. Nic Puckrin, founder of Coin Bureau, said short positions were liquidated once Bitcoin broke past its resistance level, and crypto derivatives traders had been heavily positioned in call options heading into the move. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday it is granting a five-year exemption allowing U.S. trading venues to offer tokenized stocks, a direct tailwind for Coinbase, which earns fees on every listed venue it operates. Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong said he now assumes the CLARITY Act is dead and that another path exists through the regulators, naming the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, while a House of Representatives committee advanced the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill on Thursday, a measure that still requires approval from the full House and the Senate. Strategy remains a leveraged treasury vehicle for Bitcoin, funded largely with issued equity, and its stock is still down 3% year to date even after this month's rebound.

Tradeweb Markets reported second-quarter revenues of $558.9 million, up 9% year on year, in line with analysts' expectations, as the ten financial exchanges and data stocks tracked by the report beat consensus revenue estimates by 1.6% as a group. Tradeweb, which was founded in 1996 as one of the pioneers in electronic bond trading, posted a decent beat of analysts' EBITDA estimates, but the market seemed disappointed and the stock is down 5.6% since reporting, currently trading at $102.07. Among peers, Morningstar was the strongest performer with revenues of $663.2 million, up 9.6% year on year and 2.2% above expectations, while S&P Global was the weakest, reporting revenues of $4.15 billion, up 10.4% year on year and 1% above expectations, but posting a significant miss of analysts' EBITDA estimates and full-year EPS guidance slightly missing expectations, with its stock down 7.9% since the results. FactSet reported revenues of $622.9 million, up 6.4% year on year and 1.1% above expectations, and Nasdaq reported revenues of $1.5 billion, up 14.9% year on year and 3% above expectations. Share prices of the companies in the group have held steady, up 3.6% on average since the latest earnings results.

The Federal Reserve raised its target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter point on Wednesday, Sept. 16, to 3.75% to 4%, its first rate increase since July 2023. Interactive Brokers estimates that a 0.25% rise in U.S. dollar interest rates adds about $81 million a year to net interest income, if maturing investments roll over at the new, higher rates, according to its latest quarterly filing. That $81 million amounts to about 2% of annualized net interest income and about 1% of total net revenues, and a corresponding quarter-point rise in non-U.S. dollar benchmark rates would add an additional $38 million a year. Net interest income, the broker's biggest revenue line, totaled $1.06 billion in the second quarter, more than half of the company's $1.9 billion in total net revenues, and grew 23% year over year even as the average federal funds effective rate fell to 3.63% from 4.33%, driven by balance growth. Average customer credit balances climbed by $41.7 billion year over year, average margin loans grew by $35.7 billion, and average segregated cash and securities increased by $19 billion, a pace that works out to nearly $790 million a year, almost ten times what one quarter-point hike is expected to add.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Sept. 17 Innovation Exemption creates a five-year, conditional pathway for certain tokenized U.S. stocks to trade on blockchain-based Tokenized Securities Venues, a framework that could benefit Robinhood Markets. The exemption permits trading through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools, but requires tokenized shares to give holders the same rights and privileges as conventional shares, including dividends and voting rights, while issuers can block third-party tokenization by objecting within 30 days of receiving notice from the trading venue. Robinhood cannot simply bring its existing Stock Tokens to the United States, since the company describes them as tokenized debt securities backed 1:1 by underlying shares that provide economic exposure rather than legal or beneficial ownership and are unavailable to U.S. residents. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has said the company plans to add one-for-one share redemption and voting rights after AMC CEO Adam Aron criticized the Stock Tokens for lacking traditional shareholder rights, though the SEC's allowance for issuer objections diverges from Tenev's stance. Coinbase Global is the most direct rival given its U.S. stock-trading business and international tokenized-equity efforts, while Intercontinental Exchange is developing a 24/7 digital venue for tokenized equities through the NYSE. Robinhood's first-half 2026 revenues climbed 24% year over year to $2.38 billion, earnings rose 23% to $1.00, and the company ended August with 28.6 million funded customers and $384 billion in total platform assets, up 26% year over year.

Goldman Sachs has pushed back on fears that U.S. corporate profits are in an "earnings bubble," even as it acknowledged some companies are "over-earning." Analyst Ben Snider noted that S&P 500 earnings per share grew 51% in the second quarter and 26% over the past four quarters, lifting profits well above their long-term trend. He added that while the index's forward price-to-earnings multiple of 19 is in line with its 10-year average, its multiple on trend earnings has been exceeded in recent decades only at the peak of the dot-com bubble. Still, Snider said, "our base case is for S&P 500 earnings growth to decelerate, not collapse, in coming years," forecasting EPS growth of 11% in both 2027 and 2028, to $415 and $460, respectively. The biggest long-term question is AI, he said, noting the investment boom has driven nearly half of this year's earnings growth, a tailwind that should fade in 2028 as capital spending slows and depreciation mounts, turning into a marginal drag. Snider also flagged risks from a potential fall in semiconductor prices, where an adverse scenario could cut S&P 500 earnings by about 10%, and from mega-cap technology firms' equity investment gains, which lifted second-quarter earnings by 12% but should diminish in 2027. He concluded that Goldman's 12-month S&P 500 return forecast of +14% to 8,700 reflects the view that earnings growth, rather than expanding valuations, will remain the primary driver of the bull market.

Beneficient announced it plans to launch AltLens, an alternative asset portfolio analytics and risk platform for family offices and small institutional investors, in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2026. AltLens maps each portfolio position to private-market risk segments defined by asset class, strategy, geography, and sector, and uses historical quarterly returns to calculate volatility, beta, value-at-risk, correlation, and concentration metrics. The platform will offer historical stress tests simulating the 2008-09 financial crisis, the 2000-03 technology downturn, and the 2021-22 inflationary and rising-interest-rate environment, plus custom hypothetical equity-market declines and interest-rate shocks. Chief Executive Officer James G. Silk said family offices and smaller institutions should not need an enterprise-scale system or a lengthy implementation for sophisticated alternative asset risk analysis. AltLens is part of Beneficient's broader alternative asset technology platform, which also includes AltSignal, an AI-enabled diligence engine, and AltDeal, an enterprise acquisition analysis engine; Preqin has forecast alternatives assets under management will reach approximately $29 trillion globally by 2029.

Canada has hired Morgan Stanley and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce to advise on the sale of operating rights to the country's four largest airports, Bloomberg News reported. Prime Minister Mark Carney formally announced plans to seek private investment in the government-owned assets during a speech at an investment conference on Tuesday. The four busiest airports by passenger volume are Toronto Pearson International Airport and the hubs in Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary.

Cinda Securities announced that, due to its absorption and merger by CICC, it will no longer have independent legal entity status and will be deregistered. It submitted an application for voluntary delisting of its A-shares to the Shanghai Stock Exchange on September 18, 2026. The company will publish relevant announcements after the exchange accepts the application, and will publish the delisting announcement after approval by the exchange. Subsequently, the company will be delisted, and CICC will begin the share swap.

S&P Global announced on September 17 that it has agreed to acquire blockchain security firm OpenZeppelin. The purchase price was not disclosed, and the deal is subject to customary conditions. S&P Global said the acquisition complements its risk assessment and ecosystem development capabilities in the digital asset market, with President Yann Le Pallec stating that OpenZeppelin's technology and expertise complement the company's ability to assess risks in on-chain technology. Founded in 2015, OpenZeppelin runs an open-source smart contract library regarded as the de facto industry standard, along with security audit services. More than 37 trillion dollars in value has been transferred through the library, which has over 900 audits to its name and has detected more than 10,000 vulnerabilities. After the acquisition, OpenZeppelin will continue as an independent business unit, with Demian Brener remaining as CEO, and the library will continue to be freely available on GitHub. S&P Global also led an investment in crypto market data firm Kaiko on September 14, while rival Moody's began providing ratings data on Solana in June, underscoring intensifying competition among the major ratings agencies over on-chain services.

WisdomTree and MoonPay announced a strategic partnership on September 17 aimed at expanding access to tokenized funds in the United States and supporting the management of stablecoin reserves. At the center is the tokenized money market fund WisdomTree Treasury Money Market Digital Fund, or WTGXX. WisdomTree will build an acquisition channel using MoonPay's technology and infrastructure, extending distribution from its own channel through its securities subsidiary to MoonPay, which has more than 35 million accounts. Eligible U.S. investors will be able to put money into the tokenized money market fund through infrastructure they already use, and for MoonPay, WTGXX becomes a means of managing reserves within a regulated and highly transparent structure. According to RWA.xyz, the tokenized U.S. Treasury fund market stood at 15.4 billion dollars as of September 17, shrinking about 4.9% over 30 days, and within that market WTGXX ranked fifth by ticker at 1.23 billion dollars, with net inflows of 466 million dollars over the most recent 30 days.

BNCCORP stockholders have approved the company's previously announced sale to OppFi, a tech-enabled digital finance platform, in a cash and stock transaction. Under the terms of the agreement, BNCC stockholders will receive $19.375 per share in cash and 1.9 shares of OppFi Class A common stock for each BNCC share. The vote took place on September 17, 2026, though completion remains subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. The transaction combines OppFi's online lending platform with BNC's national bank charter and diversified banking infrastructure. BNCC Chairman Michael Vekich called the stockholder vote a significant development in completing the transformative agreement. The final vote total will be reported in BNCC's quarterly report for the fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2026.

Victory Capital Holdings reported that assets under management reached $356.469 billion at August-end, up from $345.117 billion at July-end, with exchange-traded fund assets climbing to $23.474 billion from $20.889 billion. The $2.585 billion ETF increase accounted for roughly 23% of the total asset increase, lifting ETFs to approximately 6.6% of managed assets, implying monthly growth of about 3.3% in total assets under management and 12.4% in ETFs. The August update provides asset balances without separating net client flows from investment performance, though earlier disclosures showed $2.5 billion in ETF net client inflows during the first half of 2026, below the $4.115 billion recorded a year earlier. Victory Capital reported second-quarter revenue of $435.4 million and a GAAP operating margin of 44.5%, while AUM revenue realization was 47.9 basis points in the second quarter versus 49.4 basis points a year earlier. Insider Monkey's database showed 27 hedge funds holding the stock at the end of 2Q2026, down from 29 funds three months earlier.

Goldman Sachs now expects the Federal Reserve to raise rates by another 25 basis points in October, after policymakers lifted the target range to 3.75% to 4%, according to Reuters. The bank's shares slipped approximately 0.1% to $937.26 on the revised call. Sixteen of 18 Fed officials see at least one more increase this year, while four anticipate two. Goldman's forecast remains an economic call rather than a guarantee that policymakers will follow that path. For the bank, further tightening cuts both ways: higher volatility can drive more hedging, trading and risk-management activity through its markets franchise, but pricier financing can cool acquisitions, delay equity offerings and pressure asset valuations.

Iren Limited CEO Daniel Roberts argued that demand for AI compute remains structurally constrained by limited supply, even as the company's shares fell nearly 5% on September 14 and dropped 12% after it reported a $684 million net loss in its fourth quarter FY26 results. Roberts cited Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's comment that his company was operating at an 80x pace versus a planned 10x, OpenAI President Greg Brockman's remarks on continued compute constraints, Google's sevenfold increase in processing volume from a year ago, and Nvidia's guidance for roughly 70% revenue growth while describing its own outlook as supply-constrained. On the supply side, he pointed to high-bandwidth memory shortages and Goldman Sachs data suggesting only about half of scheduled U.S. data center capacity will be built on time. The AI pivot is being supported by $6.4 billion in GPU financing, including $3.6 billion of investment-grade financing for the Microsoft contract, which together with customer prepayments funds 96% of the associated GPU capex, though the structure creates meaningful customer concentration risk. Iren reported $4 billion of contracted ARR for 2026 capacity while only about $1 billion of ARR was operating as of August 26, and hedge fund ownership rose to 69 funds at the end of the second quarter of 2026 from 53 at the end of the first quarter, while short interest stood at 24.46% of float as of August 31, 2026.

Robinhood Markets Inc. rose 2.26% intraday after the SEC issued an order creating a pathway for trading venues to issue tokenized versions of US stocks, effective immediately. The order, which arrived two days after the Clarity Act failed to advance in the Senate, requires that stock tokens give holders the same rights as the underlying securities, including dividends and voting, and allows companies to block tokenization of their own shares. Under the rules, a platform must notify the issuer and wait 30 days, and if the company objects within that window, the token cannot trade; the exemption runs five years and carries volume limits. The conditions are close to what AMC's Adam Aron demanded earlier this month, when he called Robinhood's stock tokens contemptible and argued they stripped investors of shareholder rights while bypassing the company entirely. Robinhood said this week it will let token holders redeem for underlying shares one-for-one and will add voting rights, while Coinbase Global Inc., Gemini and Payward's Kraken have all launched tokenized equities offshore without offering them to US customers.

Nvidia Corp. has committed $2 billion to Brookfield Asset Management's global artificial intelligence infrastructure fund, according to investor documents that revealed the size of a previously disclosed investment. The AI giant is an anchor investor for the Brookfield Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Fund, alongside the Kuwait Investment Authority, Brookfield said last year. The fund focuses on the AI buildout, backing factories, dedicated behind-the-meter power solutions and compute infrastructure. Brookfield is raising $10 billion for the AI infrastructure fund as part of a broader plan to raise around $50 billion for the infrastructure group over the next two years, with AI featuring in every strategy. Brookfield is also part of an Nvidia consortium committing to financing AI computing deals totaling more than $500 billion.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure, telling Scott Melker that the company has built a set of tools for the agentic economy. Armstrong said the existing payment rails are sometimes not sufficient for AI because agents want to move very fast, make payments globally, and in some cases transact in very small amounts. The stack includes the Base blockchain, the USDC stablecoin that Coinbase co-created with Circle, and the X402 protocol, which Coinbase created and which is now under the Linux Foundation in collaboration with Google, AWS, CloudFlare and others. He said X402 allows agents to pay each other in real time instantly all over the world, even in very small transaction amounts like a couple of cents at a time, which traditional payment rails do not really support. Armstrong also said Coinbase has been able to bring perpetual futures products to the US under this administration, calling them a pretty killer app in the trading world, and that he expects a future not too far off in which more agents transact in the economy than humans.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the company's newly launched tokenized equities have already generated almost a billion dollars in trading volume just weeks after debut. In an interview with Scott Melker on "The Daily Wolf with Scott Melker," Armstrong said Coinbase built the tokenized shares as real securities that can be redeemed one to one for the underlying share and carry shareholder rights including dividend upside and voting, unlike the derivative, synthetic or debt-instrument versions he said he has seen elsewhere. He argued tokenized equities let users trade shares 24/7, send them anywhere in the world and tap a unified global liquidity pool, serving the roughly four billion people he said lack access to any brokerage. Armstrong said Coinbase began with stablecoins, a one-to-one backed digital token for a dollar, and now intends to tokenize everything, including private companies, treasuries and asset management funds, to make investments fast, cheap and globally distributed while reducing settlement risk. He added that the current SEC is very interested in bringing the idea to the US.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a five-year regulatory framework for the "Innovation Exemption," legalizing the trading of blockchain-based tokenized stocks in the United States for the first time. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev hailed the decision, saying "Tokenization Is Coming to America." The framework runs for five years and marks the first time tokenized equities can be traded under U.S. regulation.

Charles Schwab reported total client assets of $13.41 trillion for August 2026, up 19% year over year, driven by core net new assets of $64.8 billion, which surged 46% year over year. The company opened 424,000 new brokerage accounts during the month, up 11% year over year, while active brokerage accounts rose 6% to 40.1 million, banking accounts increased 13% to 2.4 million, and workplace plan participant accounts grew 5% to 5.9 million. Client daily average trades reached 9.8 million, up 37% year over year, margin balances soared 92% to $177.6 billion, transactional sweep cash rose 19% to $483.3 billion, and total money market fund balances reached $702.5 billion, up 6% year over year. Management's latest 2026 scenario calls for full-year net interest margin of 3.00%-3.10% and fourth-quarter net interest margin of 3.25%-3.30%, with average interest-earning assets reaching $453 billion at the end of August, up 9% from the prior-year month. Schwab's 2026 adjusted expenses are expected to rise 9.5-10.5% year over year, and over the past six months Schwab shares have gained 12.7%, underperforming the industry's 22.8% growth.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said at the Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference on Sept. 16 that fixed income, currencies and commodities activity has been relatively softer in the third quarter of 2026, while equity trading has been very strong. The moderation follows a strong first half, when Goldman generated $6.24 billion in investment banking fees, up 52% year over year, and FICC revenues of $8.60 billion, up 9%, as Global Banking & Markets revenues climbed 35% year over year to $28.26 billion. Solomon also indicated that expenses are running higher amid elevated transaction volumes and accelerated technology investments, with non-compensation expenses expected to increase by more than $500 million sequentially in the third quarter. Citigroup management expects third-quarter markets revenues to grow in the mid-single digits year over year and investment banking revenues to rise in the low-single digits, while KeyCorp raised its 2026 revenue growth outlook to 8% from a prior target of 7-8%, citing non-interest income growth of 4-5% and net interest income growth of 9-11%.

Goldman Sachs Group is arranging a reported $22b AI chip financing package linked to Blackstone and Alphabet's Crux AI venture, working with Crux AI as part of a broader push to support capital-intensive AI infrastructure projects. The bank is simultaneously expanding its private equity alternatives platform with fresh fundraises across its global private markets franchise, including new West Street funds. Goldman Sachs Group, a US-based capital markets heavyweight with a reported $295.7 billion market cap, is leaning into both AI financing and alternatives as it seeks to tilt earnings toward steadier fee income and capital-light businesses. The reported $22b AI chip financing package plays directly into that capital-light financing thesis, keeping the bank close to high-demand AI infrastructure in the same way JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley pursue large tech-related financings. The missing piece, according to the report, is how consistently Goldman can turn these AI and alternatives mandates into durable, fee-based flows when analysts have already flagged pressure on expenses and some softness in fixed income trading.

T. Rowe Price announced the launch of three new actively managed equity exchange traded funds, T. Rowe Price Biotech ETF, T. Rowe Price Small-Cap ETF and T. Rowe Price Mid-Cap Equity Research ETF, all of which began trading on the NASDAQ today. The three funds bring the firm's total ETF lineup to 38 funds, after eight new active exchange traded offerings were added this year. The Biotech ETF, ticker TDNA, is managed by John Hall and is expected to hold approximately 60-120 companies with an expense ratio of 0.55%. The Small-Cap ETF, ticker TSEE, is managed by Alex Roik, typically holds 200 or more stocks and carries an expense ratio of 0.59%. The Mid-Cap Equity Research ETF, ticker TMID, expands the firm's Structured Research Strategies lineup, is managed by Paige Davis Jr., Amanda Ludwitzke and Thomas Watson, typically holds more than 300 stocks and has an expense ratio of 0.47%. Tim Coyne, Global Head of ETFs, said the funds broaden investors' access to distinct areas of the market while combining the firm's research capabilities with the fully transparent ETF structure.