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Good morning and happy Friday.
Tomorrow is Halloween, which means angels and devils will walk the streets. New economic data aligns with that theme. US GDP grew at a heavenly 3.4% annualized pace from July to September, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Up from 2.2% in the previous quarter, the stronger-than-expected reading reflected booming business investment tied to AI and resilient consumer spending. But, for every treat, there’s a trick and, in this case, it comes (literally) at the expense of those hardy American shoppers.
The consumer price index rose a devilish 3.7% year over year in September, up from a 3.4% inflation reading in August, the Labor Department said. When it comes to the miniature Snickers that a phalanx of little Spider-Men and Wednesday Addamses will ransom you for tomorrow evening, candy prices rose at an even faster 7.7% clip. Against that backdrop, here are two market-oriented and budget-conscious last minute costume ideas. Put on a single glove and go not as H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man, but Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. Or wear a blazer and tell people you’re a recruiter, which is a zombie that feeds on human capital flight, aka brain drain.
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MARKETS
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Stock data as of market close on October 29, 2026.
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Photo via Kyodonews/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
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The Field of AI Dreams era is over. If you keep building it and they haven’t come by now, there’ll be a price to pay.
Amazon has committed to the largest capex bill of any hyperscaler this year, saying it will spend $220 billion for its data center build-out by the end of its current fiscal year. Increasingly, investors want to see the ROI and to be assured your moneymaking businesses are running on all cylinders. Amazon certainly had some healthy numbers on its side in its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. AWS revenue, a proxy for AI demand, surged 39% year over year to $46 billion, surpassing Wall Street’s expectations and marking the unit’s fastest growth rate in a half-decade, as CEO Andy Jassy swears demand is still outstripping capacity. Better yet, operating margins have literally never been fatter. Shares of the company still fell as much as 7% in after-hours trading. So what’s the problem? The company’s legacy online shopping business, actually.
Primed for Disappointment
As Elon Musk recently said, Wall Street wants its big-spending AI firms to have a healthy side hustle. And Amazon is still selling goods like the best of ‘em: Online stores revenue came in at $68.5 billion. That’s a lot of toilet paper and toothpaste, but it’s just shy of Wall Street’s consensus expectations, and marks just a 2% growth rate year over year and about $2 billion off from the prior quarter. Online advertising revenue, meanwhile, came in at $19.6 billion. The unit’s 11% year-over-year growth rate is way down from the routine 26% increase it notched the quarter prior.
The culprit for the dual disappointing results? A calendar tweak and, quite possibly, the arrival of a rival AI:
- Amazon rescheduled its annual Prime Day sale from the third quarter to the second quarter this summer in many major markets, to avoid sharing attention with the World Cup. The move made comparative figures look softer for the quarter, though sales still came in lower than the 5% growth rate most analysts expected.
- The arrival of Meta’s Muse and similar shopping agents, meanwhile, may be eating into the company’s e-commerce business. Amazon has barred the popular AI agent from its online store, possibly pushing Muse to patronize smaller rivals, and agents in general could eat at the company’s ad business (marketers, so far, are not buying the whole “AI consciousness” argument).
“Muse traction will likely drive questions on Amazon’s agentic strategy,” Bank of America analyst Justin Post wrote in a note to clients earlier this week.
  Cashing Out: Overall, revenue of nearly $202 billion came in just shy of expectations, while earnings per share of $1.89 was also a miss. Free cash flow also turned negative for the second consecutive quarter, tallying $42 billion in the trailing 12-month period. Meanwhile, net income of $20.7 billion marked a slight half-billion dollar decrease compared to the same quarter a year ago, though Amazon chalked that up to a big one-time paper gain on its considerable Anthropic ownership stake last year. Speaking of, that Anthropic stake is getting closer and closer to paying off as the frontier lab nears its IPO, with the e-commerce giant widely believed to be the public launch’s single largest beneficiary.
Written by Brian Boyle
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Photo via Betterment
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There’s no limit to Mastercard’s masterplan.
Mastercard reported third quarter revenue of $9.8 billion, up 14% year over year, and a $4.6 billion profit, up 18%, on Thursday. Both the top and bottom line bested Wall Street expectations. Management also reaffirmed a full-year outlook that calls for revenue growth in the low teens. And the standout performer driving this is not the company’s mammoth payments network, but a surging collection of services built around the data it produces.
Very Stablecoin Genius
Mastercard and its top rival Visa control as much as 90% of all card payment transactions and processing outside of China (Visa has a 38% global market share, China’s UnionPay 34% and Mastercard 25%, according to the Nilson Report). That payment network, which saw revenue climb 11% to $5.7 billion in the third quarter as resilient consumer spending meant higher transaction volumes and more fees, is still Mastercard’s bedrock. But its growth is also somewhat constrained, as plastic and digital cards are pretty much ubiquitous in mature markets like the US and Europe.
This has incentivized Mastercard and Visa to race to develop higher-margin value-added services using the data generated by their payment networks, which can offer more insight into markets and consumer behavior than an omniscient deity. They’ve developed services like risk scoring models, cyber threat monitoring and fraud detection, and are able to sell lucrative market analytics packages. Banks, merchants and retailers, and corporate and government customers gobble up the offerings. Mastercard executives have taken to calling this a “virtuous cycle,” which the third quarter earnings make it hard to dispute:
- Revenue at the company’s value-added services and solutions segment surged 19% year over year to $4.1 billion. The segment now comprises 41% of net revenue.
- Value-added services have also quickly expanded into emerging areas of tech and finance, including AI and cryptocurrency. The latest would be a risk intelligence service for banks and payment providers launched earlier this month, allowing them to detect scams and fraud in stablecoin transactions.
Mastercard’s stablecoin ambitions also include its new Global Money Platform, a settlement and payouts system that lets banks, fintechs, payroll providers and others hold, convert and transact both fiat currencies and stablecoins in one place. In advance of the launch, it finalized the $1.8 billion deal to acquire stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK in August.
View From the Street: Mastercard shares rose more than 4% on Thursday and are up 13% this year. As of Thursday, 39 of the 43 Wall Street analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research recommended buying the stock.
Written by Sean Craig
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Photo via Superhuman AI
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Photo via Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom
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DoorDash hopes investors are hungry… for consolidation. The largest food delivery company in the US said yesterday it plans to buy Instacart in a deal valued at $17 billion. That’d be DoorDash’s biggest deal yet, even after a buying spree that included UK rival Deliveroo and reservation platform SevenRooms.
DoorDash yesterday reported earnings a week early, likely to share its Instacart news ASAP, since it was already leaking like a poorly closed pho container. Instacart last week was said to be chatting with both DoorDash and rival Uber about a potential sale before reports this week said it stopped double-dipping in favor of DoorDash.
Instacart, which trades as Maplebear (a nod to Canada and California), reported yesterday what CEO Chris Rogers called its best quarter as a public company. But a team-up with DoorDash could help it avoid being crowded out of the aisle by the much larger carts of rivals like Amazon and Walmart.
Ramen With a Side of Toilet Paper
DoorDash is easily the country’s largest delivery app for hungover breakfast burritos and Instagrammable boxes of sushi. And its restaurant delivery biz is booming: DoorDash reported yesterday that its gross order value grew 36% annually in the third quarter to nearly $34 billion, a hair above analysts’ estimates. Hungry homebodies placed 993 million orders, a 28% jump.
But DoorDash wants to go beyond satisfying splurges to supplying everyday staples — a move that could shore up its biz when people trim their budgets:
- DoorDash, which already has partnerships with Kroger and Costco, said Thursday that groceries are “one of the hardest things to get right online.” Anyone who’s had their peach yogurt swapped for pumpkin-spice cream cheese is well aware. That might be why the majority of Americans still prefer to pick out their avocados and other foodstuffs IRL. But a growing portion are ordering online at least occasionally, and as the population ages, more people could depend on grocery deliveries.
- Amazon and Walmart stepped on DoorDash’s toes first: Amazon shifted its focus from the in-person experience of churning nut butter at Whole Foods to selling more pantry items online with aggressively fast delivery slots. Walmart meanwhile has expanded its under-30-minute delivery service, helping to spur e-commerce growth.
Cleanup on Aisle 3: DoorDash isn’t expected to close on a deal with Instacart until at least the end of 2027, a timeline that may be baking in scrutiny from antitrust regulators. The FTC could be especially concerned about the tie-up since groceries are necessities and cost of living is top of mind at the agency. DoorDash is one of a handful of companies the FTC said this week are being studied in regard to algorithmic pricing.
Written by Jamie Wilde
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- S is for Selloff: Following its disappointing earnings a day earlier, Google owner Alphabet shed more than half a billion dollars in market value Thursday.
- Au Revoir: European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde plans to resign early in February, saying she wants the “freedom of speech” to address things unrelated to monetary policy. Her native France has a presidential election next year.
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