Bolsonaro tops first round, Brazil assets set to surge

Flávio Bolsonaro took roughly 47% of Sunday's vote against Lula's 45%, a result that every major late poll missed by two to five points. A Datafolha survey days before the vote had Lula ahead 45 to 40. JPMorgan's pre-election scenario work put the gap between outcomes in stark terms: USD/BRL at 4.90 under Bolsonaro versus 5.50 under Lula, with equities potentially up 50% if a Bolsonaro win comes with credible fiscal tightening. A survey of 116 institutional investors by XP had already pencilled in a 6% rally and 40 basis points off swap rates on a strong Bolsonaro showing, and that's before Wednesday's runoff even starts. None of this is settled. Bolsonaro needs to build a majority coalition in three weeks, and a two-point first-round lead with Jair Bolsonaro still serving a 27-year sentence for plotting to overturn the 2022 result is a thin foundation for the market euphoria already being priced in.

EUR/USD fell as much as 0.8% to $1.1161 in Asian trading, its weakest since May 2025, after Bloomberg reported Pedro Sanchez's allies are preparing for a possible November 29 election following a parliamentary defeat on housing decrees. Spain must dissolve parliament by October 6 to hit that date. But the euro has now fallen for four straight weeks and lost over 2% in September alone, its worst month in 14 years, and France is the bigger drag: French bond spreads over Germany keep widening as budget gridlock drags on with elections looming across France, Spain and Italy in 2027. Options traders are now at their most bearish on the euro since March. Watch October 6 for Sanchez's decision, but watch French yields harder.

Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence, will now also run Trump's new Super Intelligence Force and serve as White House AI czar, a dual role confirmed in reporting on the task force. He's joined by FTC chair Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon CTO Emil Michael, and OPM director Scott Kupor, with a 120-day deadline to deliver recommendations to Trump and chief of staff Susie Wiles. Putting a national-security official in charge rather than a commerce or science appointee signals that Washington now treats frontier AI as a strategic threat category first and a commercial one second. The charter reportedly warns against regulatory capture, language that will read as either reassurance or a trap depending on how close a company sits to the administration. Nothing here is binding yet. The actual fight starts when that report lands and someone has to decide whether it becomes an executive order or gets quietly shelved.

Firmus Grid plans to allocate roughly half its IPO shares back to existing backers, including Nvidia and Blackstone, according to people familiar with the deal. The offering is priced at A$11 a share, targeting at least A$5 billion and potentially A$7.1 billion with the greenshoe, which would make this one of Australia's largest IPOs ever. Demand is already running well above the share count on offer. Nvidia is simultaneously Firmus's investor, chip supplier and reported customer, an arrangement that works brilliantly until someone asks whether the company's valuation reflects genuine demand or circular financing. The numbers underline the tension: Firmus is expected to report a US$77 million loss for the current half-year against an implied valuation north of US$30 billion, a sum built almost entirely on projected AI compute demand rather than current earnings.

AkzoNobel is selling its decorative-paints operations across Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Papua New Guinea and Australia to Nippon Paint for an enterprise value of $1.35 billion, roughly 21 times FY2025 EBITDA according to the companies' statement. AkzoNobel nets about $1 billion after tax and minority payments, cash that lands just as it prepares its all-stock merger with Axalta into a group valued near $25 billion. Nippon Paint had wanted the entire global decorative-paints unit, reportedly offering around 7.5 billion euros for it, and AkzoNobel said no. This deal gives Nippon regional scale without AkzoNobel surrendering the bigger prize, and it leaves open whether Nippon comes back for more once it has digested seven new markets. Indonesia closes separately in late 2026; the rest waits for regulatory sign-off around mid-2027.

India's Monetary Policy Committee meets October 5 to 7 with a Reuters poll showing 35 of 61 economists expecting a 25 basis point hike to 5.50%, the first increase after four straight holds at 5.25%. The problem the RBI created for itself: a banking liquidity surplus that hit 11.6 trillion rupees on September 6, nearly 4% of total deposits, driven largely by FCNR(B) deposit inflows, has pushed the overnight call rate so far below the repo rate that the policy rate barely functions as a signal anymore. Variable-rate reverse repo auctions, bond sales and FX swaps have clawed the surplus down to around 4.85 trillion rupees by September 30, but that is still enough excess cash to blunt any rate hike unless the RBI keeps draining it. Inflation has run above the 4% target for three straight months. A hike without liquidity discipline is a rate rise in name only.

LME copper rose as much as 0.9% on Monday after September's nonfarm payrolls came in at just 29,000 against a forecast of 90,000, with the unemployment rate climbing to 4.2%. The odds of an October Fed hike collapsed from above 70% a week earlier to roughly 17 to 21%, weakening the dollar and making dollar-priced copper cheaper for everyone else. Copper is already up 29% year over year and touched a record $6.85 a pound in September, so this is a rally stacking on an already extreme move rather than a fresh breakout. The uncomfortable part: weak payrolls are bullish for copper through rate expectations but eventually bearish if they signal slowing industrial demand, and markets are choosing to ignore that tension for now. December hike odds remain elevated, which is where the next test sits.

Spot gold edged up 0.3% to $4,153.66 an ounce Monday, a small bounce after its worst week since June. The same September payroll miss that lifted copper pulled gold's October rate-hike odds down to around 20% from 70%, which should be straightforwardly bullish for an asset that pays no yield. It isn't, because the 10-year Treasury was still trading near 5.2% and the 30-year above 5.5%, levels last seen in 2002, and that keeps the opportunity cost of holding bullion uncomfortably high. Gold fell more than 6% in September despite all the geopolitical and fiscal-risk headlines that normally support it. The metal needs yields to fall, not just rate-hike odds, and right now those two things are moving in opposite directions.

Brokers now account for 21% of Indian commercial-paper issuance, up from 4% in 2021, raising about 3.2 trillion rupees ($33 billion) this year to fund margin-trading facilities that let retail investors buy shares with partial upfront payment. Outstanding margin loans hit 1.43 trillion rupees in August, up 53% year on year, as regulators pushed investors away from short-dated options and into leveraged cash equities instead. Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath has already called the pace of margin lending scary, flagging concentration risk in less-liquid mid and small caps. The exposure is still small against India's total market cap, under half a percent, but it is a much bigger share of free-float capitalisation at 0.87%, and that is the number that matters in a sharp sell-off because free-float stock gets forced out first. Tighter bank collateral rules, including haircuts as high as 40% on equities, are already pushing brokers toward exactly the short-term debt market now absorbing the strain.

Wrexham's accounts for the year to June 2025 show turnover of 33.33 million pounds, up 24%, against an operating loss of 14.8 million pounds, driven by an 81% jump in the wage bill as Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney's club built a squad for three straight promotions. Commercial income has grown more than 14-fold since the 2021 takeover, according to BBC analysis, and the club still sells around 100,000 shirts a year, half to overseas fans, proof the Hollywood documentary strategy converts into actual cash rather than just attention. The harder number is the stadium: StoK Cae Ras lost its temporary Kop Stand this season, capping capacity just as projected 2025-26 turnover climbs toward 50 million pounds. If Wrexham reaches the Premier League, broadcast income could jump from roughly 11 million pounds to 110 million pounds, but the league's squad-cost ratio caps player spending at 85% of revenue, a discipline this ownership group has not yet shown. CEO Michael Williamson is now managing a business that has outgrown its ground faster than it has turned a profit.

Devon Energy completed its merger with Coterra on September 30 and moved headquarters to Houston's Memorial City Plaza, while Expand Energy, formerly Chesapeake, announced its own Houston relocation back in February. Together the two were Oklahoma City's largest publicly traded oil-and-gas names, and their departure concentrates executive decision-making in Houston even as both companies insist operations stay put, citing roughly 1,000 Devon and 500 Expand employees remaining locally, according to reporting summarised by GuruFocus. Devon says there is no plan to change the lighting on the Devon Energy Center, the tower that still carries the city's old corporate identity. The real shift is structural: mergers keep producing fewer, larger operators, and Houston's deeper bench of advisers, capital and talent means headquarters status increasingly follows the deal rather than the asset base.

Rashad al-Alimi, head of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, ordered a full military campaign on October 4 to retake Houthi-held territory, with the Saudi-led coalition pledging full operational support through coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki. The trigger was the Houthis seizing strategic western coastal territory in early September and cutting the Taiz-Aden road, advances that put them closer to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the busiest shipping chokepoints on earth. Yemen's government claims 257 strikes against Houthi positions; the coalition claims 97 more; the Houthis claim 106 strikes against them in 24 hours. None of these figures are independently verified, and all come from parties with an incentive to overstate success. What matters commercially is whether fighting near Bab el-Mandeb disrupts shipping routes already rerouted once this decade, pushing up war-risk insurance and freight costs between Asia and Europe.

Five-year yields near 6.94% could hit 7% as liquidity withdrawal bites harder on short maturities than on 10-year debt, narrowing the spread to a projected 10 basis points.

The Stock Exchange of Thailand wants founders to keep voting control after an IPO, targeting 2027 implementation pending parliamentary approval of public-company law changes.

Strategist Homin Lee argues the US 10-year's move to 5.34%, its highest since 2002, reflects growth optimism rather than policy panic, a distinction that matters because growth-led yield rises rarely sink equity valuations the way inflation-led ones do.