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Gold slides 2% to test $4,000 as metals rout deepens across complex
Edgen Stock·Jul 23 2026, 23:58Share to
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[1] Gold falls 2%, testing the psychological threshold of $4,000 (https://wallstreetcn.com/livenews/3139079 ...)[2] Gold Price Today: July 23, 2026 (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/gold ...)[3] XAU/USD - Gold Spot US Dollar (https://www.investing.com/currencies/xau-usd ...)
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Jul 24 2026, 01:29
Enova beats Q2 estimates with $4.31 EPS as originations surge 27%
Enova International posted Q2 adjusted earnings of $4.31 per share, topping the $3.99 consensus estimate by 8 percent. "Our strong quarterly performance reflects disciplined credit management and sustained demand across our lending platforms," CEO David Fisher said. Revenue climbed 21.6 percent year over year to $928.9 million, exceeding the $909.6 million analyst forecast. Originations jumped 27 percent from a year earlier, while pre-tax profit reached $140.1 million, representing a 15.1 percent margin. The company has now delivered eight consecutive quarters of 30 percent or more EPS growth. Shares rose 5.6 percent to $230.12 in after-hours trading. The stock has gained 41.5 percent year to date, far outpacing the S&P 500's 9.6 percent advance. Enova raised its full-year guidance and expects to complete the acquisition of Grasshopper Bank later this year. The Chicago-based online lender, which serves non-prime consumers and small businesses in the U.S. and Brazil, has benefited from its proprietary risk-scoring platform built on more than 65 terabytes of customer behavior data. The company's ability to tighten credit standards while still growing originations has been a key driver of margin expansion. Enova's results mark the fourth straight quarter in which it has surpassed consensus EPS estimates. The favorable estimate revision trend ahead of the report translated into a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) rating for the stock. The guidance raise signals management's confidence in sustaining momentum through the second half of the year. Investors will watch the upcoming earnings call for updated commentary on credit trends and the integration timeline for Grasshopper Bank. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
Jul 24 2026, 01:21
NVIDIA invests $300 million in joint AI lab with South Korea's KAIST
**NVIDIA is betting $300 million that South Korea's top engineering talent can help it win the agentic AI race.** NVIDIA and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology on Wednesday announced a joint AI research laboratory at KAIST's Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI in Seoul, dedicated to advancing agentic AI models and agent systems built for South Korea's industries, language and future. The collaboration includes $50-million-per-year compute contributions across an initial five-year period, plus funding for at least 10 KAIST researchers annually with internship opportunities at NVIDIA. "Korea is home to leading AI researchers and is one of the world's most advanced technology ecosystems," Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at NVIDIA, said. "The joint NVIDIA-KAIST research lab will provide a foundation for the next frontier of AI research to accelerate AI models and agent systems built for Korea's industries, language and future." The lab will use NVIDIA Nemotron open models and local NVIDIA Cloud Partner infrastructure to build a pipeline from academic discovery to enterprise and national AI deployments. Among its priorities is developing models optimized for the Korean language and Korea-specific use cases — a market where language-specific AI models remain scarce despite the country's status as one of the world's most digitally connected economies. South Korea ranks fourth globally in AI research publication volume but has struggled to retain top talent, with many graduates joining U.S. tech companies. NVIDIA plans to hire exceptional Korean researchers for full-time positions, creating a direct pathway from academia to industry. **Why Korea matters for NVIDIA's agentic AI push** The partnership comes as the race to build agentic AI systems — models that can autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks — intensifies among hyperscalers and chipmakers. NVIDIA's dominance in AI training hardware, with an estimated 80% to 95% market share in data center GPUs, faces growing pressure from custom chips designed by Google, Amazon and AMD. Google's eighth-generation TPU, unveiled in April, uses a systolic array architecture that delivers higher throughput per watt than NVIDIA GPUs for matrix multiplication, the core operation in large language model training and inference. South Korea is also home to Samsung Electronics, the world's largest memory chipmaker and a key NVIDIA supplier for high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators. The collaboration gives NVIDIA a deeper foothold in a country where its chips power much of the AI infrastructure but where local model development has lagged behind the U.S. and China. KAIST, founded in 1971, is consistently ranked among Asia's top science and engineering universities and has produced many of Korea's leading AI researchers. Hyunwoo Kim, incoming faculty member at the KAIST Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI who will serve as head of the joint lab, said the partnership will help Korea attract and retain top AI scientists while building ties with NVIDIA's global research organization. **What the deal means for investors** The $300 million commitment is modest relative to NVIDIA's $130 billion in trailing 12-month revenue but strategically significant. It signals that NVIDIA is investing beyond hardware sales into the software and research ecosystems that determine long-term platform lock-in. The company's CUDA software platform already serves as the dominant development environment for AI workloads, and partnerships like this extend that moat into academic research pipelines where future AI architects are trained. NVIDIA shares trade at roughly 35 times forward earnings, a premium that reflects its near-monopoly in AI training chips but also embeds expectations that it can defend that position against custom silicon from Google, Amazon and AMD. The KAIST lab, by training Korean researchers on NVIDIA's full-stack platform — from Nemotron models to Cloud Partner infrastructure — creates a generation of developers whose workflows are optimized for NVIDIA hardware, not competing architectures. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
Jul 24 2026, 01:17
Iran tensions push bond yields higher as borrowing costs surge
**Renewed hostilities between the US and Iran are reverberating through bond markets, driving up borrowing costs for homebuyers and businesses as traders price in a fresh wave of inflationary pressure from surging energy prices.** "The bond market is repricing for a scenario where central banks cannot cut rates because energy-driven inflation keeps headline CPI elevated," said Elena Fischer, geopolitical risk analyst at Edgen. "The transmission from the Strait of Hormuz to the 10-year Treasury yield is now the fastest it has been since the 2022 energy crisis." Brent crude climbed above $99 a barrel on Thursday, its highest level in two months, after Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi group claimed attacks on two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Red Sea. West Texas Intermediate rose above $90 a barrel. The escalation followed President Donald Trump's threat of military action against Iranian infrastructure, stoking fears of supply disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that handles about 21 percent of global oil trade. The jump in energy costs has reignited inflation concerns that had been slowly receding. US Treasury yields rose across the curve, with the benchmark 10-year note climbing 12 basis points to 4.38 percent, while the policy-sensitive two-year yield added 8 basis points to 4.12 percent. Higher yields translate directly into increased costs for mortgage borrowers, corporate debt issuers, and government financing — a dynamic that threatens to tighten financial conditions just as the Federal Reserve had been signaling a potential easing cycle. **Oil at $100 and the Inflation Calculus** Crude prices have surged more than 30 percent this month alone, according to market data, as a series of geopolitical shocks compounded. The Houthi attacks on Saudi vessels in the Red Sea created a new front in the regional conflict, threatening an alternative shipping route that had become critical after shipments through the Persian Gulf declined sharply. Saudi exports across the Red Sea had emerged as a crucial substitute for disrupted Hormuz traffic, and any blockade there would leave global markets with few options. The last time Brent traded above $100 for a sustained period, in the first half of 2022, US headline CPI peaked at 9.1 percent and the Fed delivered 425 basis points of rate hikes over seven months. While the current economic backdrop differs — the labor market has cooled and supply chains are more diversified — the speed of the oil move is what concerns bond traders. A sustained $100-plus oil price would add an estimated 0.6 to 0.8 percentage points to headline inflation, according to Bloomberg Economics models cited in recent research notes. **Borrowing Costs Bite** The impact is already visible in credit markets. Investment-grade bond spreads widened 5 basis points Thursday, while high-yield spreads pushed out 12 basis points, data from ICE BofA show. Mortgage rates, which had been drifting lower through early July, reversed course as the 10-year yield rose, with the average 30-year fixed rate climbing back above 6.9 percent. For emerging markets, the stakes are even higher. India, a net energy importer, is facing LPG under-recoveries exceeding 510 billion rupees ($6.1 billion) as of June, the government told parliament Thursday, with state-run oil marketing companies absorbing losses on fuel sales. The Reserve Bank of India may now face pressure to hold rates steady even as domestic growth slows, a dilemma shared by central banks across Asia and Africa. Equity markets reflected the shift in risk appetite. The S&P 500 fell 0.6 percent in futures trading, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 slid 0.9 percent, as investors rotated out of growth stocks sensitive to higher discount rates. The VIX, Wall Street's fear gauge, rose above 22 for the first time in three weeks. What happens next depends on whether diplomatic channels can contain the conflict. Envoys from the US and Iran were reported to be holding talks in Pakistan on July 21, even as military operations continued. If the Strait of Hormuz remains open and the Red Sea attacks are contained, oil prices could retreat quickly, easing the inflation scare. But if the conflict widens, the bond market's repricing of risk has further to run — and borrowing costs for households and companies will keep climbing. *This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.*