Market Update

I was looking to Wall Street with about half an hour's trading to go.

They're positive, although you wouldn't say that they were overly enthusiastic or rambunctious.

But clearly with the anthropic news still being digested, not too many details there.

One thing that's sort of flown under the radar in the sort of turbulence created by Anthropix Sharefloat News is that Meta, the people who own Facebook, they're looking to raise $95 billion, which I suppose in AI terms is just loose change down the back of the sofa.

They're looking to do it to expand their own presence in the AI sector.

Their issue, of course, is that they actually don't have cloud accounting or anything like that to be able to finance it.

So they're going to have a share sale and they're going to have to borrow some money to do it.

But obviously, that won't be too big a deal.

But it just goes to show the demands on capital that there are from big AI and tech companies.

At the moment, the Dow Jones average is up 0.25%, the S&P 500 0.8% higher, and the Nasdaq is just 1% up.

Around the top 50 index will start just over 13,700.

A four-day week looking at the initial announcements coming through.

Nothing too exciting.

A couple of company upgrades or investor updates there that we'll bring you at lunchtime.

On the energy front, Brent crude oil currently at around $116 a barrel.

It's ducking and diving in that 115, 117 range.

Varying reports about possible drone attacks on Saudi Arabia energy.

Attempts by Middle East countries to negotiate with Iran at the moment, but prices, let's just say, they're still high.

New Zealand dollar, 56.9 US, 81 Australian, 42.6 pence.

And we should look at gold, up $22, 4,017 US dollars an ounce.