October 28, 2026 · PM edition

Wall Street Eats the AI Boom While the NBA Eats Its Own Roster

The house always wins, but at least the house has good equity trading revenue to cushion the moral collapse.

FF2K generated dispatch art for Wall Street Eats the AI Boom While the NBA Eats Its Own Roster

Full recap

Good morning. Wall Street's Big Three, Goldman, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley, have quietly cornered 80% of equity trading revenue this year, pocketing $52 billion by lending money to hedge funds so those hedge funds can bet on AI stocks. This is not a meritocracy. This is a toll booth wearing a Bloomberg terminal. SpaceX, Super Micro Computer, Netflix, and Dell are all moving in premarket and after-hours action, which means the same stocks are apparently having a full emotional breakdown across every time zone. SMCI in particular has become the market's favorite pinata, swinging wildly while analysts scramble to explain it after the fact. Hasbro, Northrop Grumman, Equifax, and General Motors also made midday noise, which is a sentence that sounds like a fever dream but is actually just a Tuesday. When the toy company and the defense contractor are moving together, you know the market is just a very expensive slot machine with better PR. Now to the NBA, where the injury report is becoming more reliable than the box score. Tyrese Haliburton is week-to-week with a hamstring strain after missing all of last season with an Achilles tear. Four games. He lasted four games. The man's body has the durability of a Series A startup. The Thunder, somehow still unbeaten, are now so short-handed heading into Dallas that they are reportedly eyeing players they have already had. Recycling roster pieces is a bold strategy. It is also, coincidentally, exactly what Wall Street does with financial products every decade or so. Down in the WNBA Finals, the Atlanta Dream are facing elimination at home in Game 6 against the Valkyries, in what the league has scheduled as a midday tip-off. Nothing says 'we believe in this product' quite like scheduling a potential championship clincher when most of your audience is in a staff meeting. The through line today: the people with the most leverage, whether that is margin lending desks or healthy hamstrings, win. Everyone else watches from the lobby and refreshes their portfolio app.

Highlights

  • Goldman, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley captured 80% of equity trading revenue this year. Free markets, everybody.
  • Tyrese Haliburton played four games before his body filed a formal objection. The Achilles came for him last year; the hamstring showed up this year like a sequel nobody asked for.
  • The WNBA scheduled a potential Finals clincher at noon on a weekday, which is either a scheduling disaster or proof that the league's core audience works from home and owns a television.
  • OKC is unbeaten, undermanned, and apparently shopping for familiar faces at the trade deadline before the calendar even flips to November. Early panic or just good asset management? Wall Street would call it both.

Original source links