MARKET SNAPSHOT

U.S. stocks kicked off November with mixed results as investors digested Kimberly-Clark's $40 billion purchase of Tylenol maker Kenvue and awaited another busy week of earnings. Treasury yields were mixed as Federal Reserve officials reiterated the message that a December rate cut was far from certain. The U.S. dollar strengthened. Oil futures edged higher. Gold rose for the third time in the past four sessions.

MARKET WRAPS

EQUITIES

U.S. stocks finished mixed on Monday in a relatively calm first trading day of November, following a record-setting October.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 0.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.5% and the S&P 500 added 0.2%.

Kenvue's stock jumped after Kimberly-Clark agreed to buy the Tylenol maker for over $40 billion. Shares in the buyer, the maker of Huggies diapers, slid 15%.

Amazon stock extended its run-up, boosted by news of a $38 billion agreement with OpenAI.

Though Monday was relatively quiet, this week will be another busy one for earnings, with results due across a swathe of industries.

Investors are also watching for further updates on U.S.-China trade relations. Beijing said over the weekend it would ease export restrictions on crucial auto semiconductors made by Nexperia. U.S. chip stocks rose, and European auto shares also rallied.

Microsoft said it had received long-awaited approval to export Nvidia chips to the United Arab Emirates, which has close ties to China.

Earlier Monday, markets in Asia closed higher.

Mainland China stocks rose, supported by oil and banking stocks. The market mostly ignored the private gauge data of China's manufacturing activity, which showed Chinese factories continued to expand production in October, albeit at a slower pace, signaling weaker growth momentum heading into the final quarter of the year.

The Shanghai Composite Index led the gains, closing 0.5% higher, while the Shenzhen Composite Index and the ChiNext Price Index rose 0.4% and 0.3% respectively.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index rose 1%.

Australia's S&P/ASX 200 Benchmark Index gained 0.1%.

In New Zealand, the S&P/NZX 50 Index closed flat.

Markets in Japan were closed due to a public holiday.

COMMODITIES

Crude futures made small gains after OPEC+ said it will return another 137,000 barrels a day of curtailed production in December, but will pause output increases in the first quarter of 2026.

"Any negative price implications from OPEC's furtherance of this quarter's 137,000 b/d production increase were offset by the cartel's suggested pause in output advances after the end of this year," Ritterbusch said.

OPEC+ attributed the pause to seasonality, and said the group maintained "full flexibility to continue pausing or reverse the additional voluntary production adjustments."

WTI settled up 0.1% at $61.05 a barrel, and Brent rose 0.2% to $64.89.

Gold futures closed higher for the third trading day out of the past four, with the front-month contract rising 0.5% to $4,000.30 a troy ounce.

Analysts are mixed on the outlook for gold.

"Markets have stayed cautious amid the prolonged U.S. government shutdown, which has limited the release of new economic data and created an atmosphere of waiting rather than action," said Antonio Di Giacomo of XS.com.

Front-month gold is now off roughly 8% from an all-time high, but remains up 52% for the year.

TODAY'S TOP HEADLINES

Embattled Fed Governor Lisa Cook Voices Support for Recent Rate Cut

Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook said she supported last week's decision to cut interest rates because she thought weaker-than-expected job-market conditions remained a greater risk than persistent inflation.

On Monday, Cook echoed central themes from Fed Chair Jerome Powell's press conference last week, including that interest rates remain modestly restrictive after the latest cut and that the Fed faces a challenging set of trade-offs ahead. Lowering rates too much could risk a period of higher inflation while keeping them too high raises the risks of a sharp economic deterioration, she said.

Cook didn't weigh in directly on whether the central bank should cut interest rates again at its next meeting in December. "Every meeting, including December's, is a live meeting," she said.

U.S. Factory Activity Contracts at Faster Pacer as Production Lags

U.S. factory activity retreated at a slightly sharper pace this month, as production fell into contraction, according to a survey of manufacturing firms.

The Institute for Supply Management said Monday that its purchasing managers' index of manufacturing activity fell to 48.7 in October from 49.1 in September. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected the index to edge up to 49.3.

With the reading still below 50, it points to contraction in activity in the sector for the eighth month in a row, though a score above 42.3 on the index generally tallies with expansion in the wider U.S. economy.

Trump Officials Torpedoed Nvidia's Push to Export AI Chips to China

Shortly before President Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea, an urgent issue emerged. Trump wanted to discuss a request by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang to allow sales of a new generation of artificial-intelligence chips to China, current and former administration officials said.

Greenlighting the export of Nvidia's Blackwell chips would be a seismic policy shift potentially giving China, the U.S.'s biggest geopolitical competitor, a technological accelerant. Huang-who speaks to Trump often-has lobbied relentlessly to maintain access to the Chinese market.

As they prepared to meet Xi, top officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Trump the sales would threaten national security, saying they would boost China's AI data-center capabilities and backfire on the U.S., the officials said.

Palantir Revenue Hits Another Record as Defense Work Booms

Palantir Technologies reported another quarter of record revenue on Monday, propelled by a surge in new customers flocking to buy artificial-intelligence technology from one of the hottest names on Wall Street.

The data-analytics company said it had $1.18 billion in sales for the third quarter, a year-over-year gain of 63%, and a net profit of $475.6 million. Both came in ahead of analyst expectations.

The Denver-based firm, which sells software to centralize, manage and analyze large amounts of data, has been riding AI-driven momentum that has pushed its share price ever higher. The company's newfound cachet in Washington has helped it gain more government contracts, including in recent weeks a $100 million contract with the Internal Revenue Service and $400 million award from the State Department.

Kimberly-Clark Strikes $40 Billion Deal for Tylenol Maker Kenvue

Kimberly-Clark has agreed to buy Kenvue for more than $40 billion, combining the maker of Huggies diapers with the owner of Tylenol in one of the biggest takeovers of the year.

In the cash-and-stock deal, Kimberly-Clark will pay $21.01 a share, compared with a closing price of $14.37 on Friday. Kimberly-Clark said the deal, including debt, has a total value of $48.7 billion.

The combination would create a global health-and-wellness company with annual revenues of approximately $32 billion and 10 billion-dollar brands, including Kimberly-Clark's household staples such as Kleenex tissues and Cottonelle toilet paper and Kenvue's products such as Tylenol and Listerine mouthwash.

OpenAI, Amazon Sign $38 Billion Cloud Deal

OpenAI has agreed to pay Amazon.com $38 billion for computing power in a multiyear deal that marks the first partnership between the startup and the cloud company.

The deal, unveiled Monday, will help satisfy OpenAI's fast-growing computing needs. Amazon expects that all of the computing capacity negotiated as part of the agreement will be available to OpenAI by the end of next year, giving the ChatGPT maker quick access to powerful Nvidia chips housed inside its data centers.

Amazon is under pressure from investors to accelerate the growth of its Amazon Web Services cloud business. AWS is the industry's largest cloud provider, but rivals such as Microsoft and Google have reported faster cloud-revenue growth in recent years after capturing new demand from artificial-intelligence customers.

Microsoft's AI Efforts in the U.A.E. Get a Big Boost

Microsoft said it has secured U.S. approval to ship Nvidia chips to the United Arab Emirates and would boost its investment there, two wins for the Middle East in the rapidly evolving artificial-intelligence race.

In a blog post Monday, the tech giant said the Trump administration has approved its plans to send chips to the U.A.E. for building data centers needed to train AI models. The approval was expected as part of a deal between the two nations that was first announced in May. Other companies involved include ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Oracle.

Microsoft also said it would invest an additional $8 billion on data centers, cloud computing and other AI projects in the Gulf state over the next four years. The tech giant is plowing money into data centers to keep up with competitors, a contest largely driven by access to computing power and energy.

Expected Major Events for Tuesday

00:30/JPN: Oct Japan Manufacturing PMI

03:30/AUS: Reserve Bank of Australia monetary policy decision

05:00/JPN: Oct Auto sales

21:00/SKA: Oct International Reserves

21:45/NZ: 3Q Household Labour Force Survey

21:45/NZ: 3Q Labour Cost Index (Salary & Wage Rates)

21:45/NZ: 3Q Quarterly Employment Survey

22:00/AUS: Oct Australia Services PMI

22:00/AUS: Oct Australian PMI

22:00/AUS: Oct Australian PCI

23:50/JPN: Oct Monetary Base

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November 03, 2025 16:50 ET (21:50 GMT)

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