Financials

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.

Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets cardholders give an AI agent a virtual card to buy things online without checking in before each purchase, with limits on spending, retailers, or required approval before checkout. Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed, while Meta's Muse can search for products and navigate checkout but presents the purchase for the user's final approval. Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, called it "a land grab for infrastructure standards," saying that if card companies set the standards for agentic commerce they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come. Consumer appetite lags the infrastructure push: just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide, and more than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf. Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to record who authorized the agent to shop and what it was authorized to buy, but when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent and did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.

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.

U.S. Bancorp has raised its quarterly common-stock dividend by 3.8% to $0.54 per share from $0.52, extending a streak that now stands at 15 consecutive years of dividend increases. At the new rate shareholders will receive $2.16 per share annually, with the next payment scheduled for October 15, 2026, and at a recent share price of about $62.84 that annualized payout translates into a forward dividend yield of roughly 3.4%. The increase follows prior steps from $0.49 to $0.50 in 2024 and from $0.50 to $0.52 in 2025, putting dividend growth over the past two years at about 10%. The payout looks manageable against earnings: the company reported 2025 diluted EPS of $4.62 while dividends declared per common share totaled $2.04 for the year, a payout of roughly 44%, and current forward-looking data puts the payout ratio at roughly 37% to 43% depending on the earnings measure used. Capital strength supports the distribution, with a 10.8% CET1 ratio as of March 31, 2026 against an applicable minimum requirement including its stress capital buffer of 7.1%, and the bank retained $4.1 billion of capacity under its existing $5 billion share-repurchase authorization at the end of the first quarter.

PayPal Holdings is using its PayPal World initiative to strengthen connectivity across its consumer ecosystem, and the effort facilitated roughly $200 million in total payment volume between PayPal and Venmo in the second quarter. The company is focusing on increasing engagement among existing customers, as second-quarter payment transactions rose 8% year over year and transactions per active account, excluding payment service provider activity, rose 7%, while monthly active accounts increased just 1%. Venmo illustrates the monetization potential of deeper engagement: Venmo total payment volume grew 14% year over year, monthly active accounts for the Venmo Debit Card increased more than 50%, and customers using both Venmo Debit and Pay with Venmo generated more than nine times the average revenue per account of peer-to-peer-only users. Among competitors, Block generated $3.17 billion in gross profit in the second quarter of 2026, up 25% year over year, with Cash App gross profit up 31% to $1.97 billion and Square gross profit up 13% to $1.16 billion on Square GPV of $72.8 billion, while Fiserv reported $5.29 billion in GAAP revenues, down 4%, adjusted revenues of $4.96 billion, down 4%, and adjusted EPS of $1.84, down 26%. PayPal shares have gained 24.5% over the past three months and trade at a forward 12-month P/E of 9.31X, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for full-year 2026 EPS has been revised upward to $5.38 over the past two months, indicating a year-over-year increase of 1.3%.

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.

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway effective immediately at age 96, becoming chairman emeritus while remaining on the board, with Greg Abel now running the company and Howard Buffett becoming chairman. Buffett took control of Berkshire in 1965 and compounded per-share market value at 19.7% annually from 1965 through 2025, versus 10.5% for the S&P 500 with dividends, producing a 6,099,294% cumulative gain against 46,061% for the index. Abel became chief executive in January and has already put Berkshire's cash to work, investing $10 billion in Alphabet's June private placement and accumulating roughly 106 million shares worth $37.8 billion by June 30, making Alphabet Berkshire's third-largest stock holding. Berkshire was a net buyer of stocks in the second quarter, investing $23.5 billion while selling $3.7 billion. Howard Buffett, a Berkshire director since 1993, becomes chairman as a guardian of the company's culture and values, while Abel retains responsibility for major capital-allocation decisions.

Prudential Financial's net investment income stands to benefit from higher interest rates after the Federal Reserve raised the federal funds target range by 25 basis points to 3.75-4% on Sept. 16, 2026, citing still-elevated inflation. Because Prudential Financial holds a large general-account investment portfolio, higher rates can lift investment income as cash flows and maturities are reinvested at higher yields, a dynamic especially relevant to its Retirement and other spread businesses. In second-quarter 2026, the general-account fixed-maturity portfolio generated a 4.67% investment yield, up from 4.39% a year earlier, while fixed-maturity investment income rose to $3.79 billion from $3.41 billion. Higher rates could also make fixed annuities more attractive to customers seeking guaranteed yield and let Prudential Financial price new products using higher prevailing investment yields, though the benefit is gradual because much of the portfolio is invested for the long term. On the negative side, higher Treasury yields generally reduce the market value of existing fixed-income securities, and Prudential Financial notes that rising rates can create earnings and capital volatility, although its liability-management and hedging programs are designed to mitigate that exposure. Separately, Selective Insurance Group continues to benefit from elevated investment income supported by higher yields and growth in invested assets, while net investment income acts as a second earnings engine for Travelers after underwriting profit. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Prudential Financial's third-quarter and fourth-quarter 2026 EPS has moved up 0.2% and 0.3%, respectively, over the past 30 days, and the same for full-year 2026 and 2027 EPS has moved up 2.3% and 0.9%.

HSBC announced an enhanced Premier offering in the United States, expanding its focus on affluent customers, a segment representing approximately 40% of global wealth. The proposition spans four areas — wealth, health, travel and international — and is available now in the US. On the wealth side, new digital capabilities in HSBC's US mobile app let customers open a new HSBC Securities (USA) Inc. Self-Directed brokerage account, view portfolio holdings and trade mutual funds in real-time. The health component adds complimentary membership to a third-party health and wellness service with 24/7 telemedicine, while the travel component offers global 24/7 support, no foreign transaction fees and card rewards through merchant partnerships. The international component provides competitive foreign exchange rates, no HSBC fees on international transfers and pre-arrival account opening for customers moving to the US. Racquel Oden, Head of International Wealth and Premier Banking and Private Banking in the US, said customers are living more connected lives than ever and want their wealth to support the lives they are building. The launch is supported by HSBC's network of 21 Wealth Centers across the US; the bank relaunched its Park Avenue Wealth Center in New York earlier this year and will relaunch its Cupertino, California center this month.

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.

Fifth Third Bancorp declared a quarterly cash dividend of 42 cents per share for the third quarter of 2026, a 5% increase from the prior payout, payable Oct. 15, 2026, to shareholders of record as of Sept. 30, 2026. The increase marks FITB's 11th consecutive annual increase in its common dividend, following an 8.1% raise to 40 cents per share in September 2025, and the dividend has grown at an annualized rate of 6.9%. The company's payout ratio is nearly 41%, and based on yesterday's closing price of $53.27 its dividend yield stands at around 3%, above the industry average of 2.8%, supported by a common equity Tier 1 ratio of 9.93% as of June 30, 2026. Share repurchases remain on hold as FITB integrates Comerica, which it acquired in February 2026; of the $100 million repurchase plan authorized in June 2025, approximately $93.1 million remained available as of June 30, 2026. COO Jamie C. Leonard said at the Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference that FITB expects to return to a more normalized repurchase program in the fourth quarter, with the Comerica technology and brand conversion complete and the bank on track to achieve an $850 million annualized expense-synergy run-rate by the fourth quarter.

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.