Francesca Fontana

I'm Francesca Fontana.

Have a great weekend and see you next Saturday.

Hey, listeners, it's Saturday, October 18th.

I'm Francesca Fontana for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News in Markets, our look at the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them.

Let's get to it.

It was an up and down week for the markets.

On Monday, stocks were regaining ground thanks to comments from the Trump administration that eased investors' fears of a revived trade war with China.

And this optimism in the market was further stoked by strong quarterly reports from banks that kicked off earnings season.

The big picture takeaway there?

America's biggest bankers said that the economy is solid, the U.S.

consumer is healthy, and they haven't seen much change in recent months.

And that sent investors cheering on Wednesday.

Then Thursday came along and the mood soured a bit on worries about the health of regional banks.

So how did all shake out?

Well, on a weekly basis, the Dow ended 1.6% higher, the S&P gained 1.7%, and the Nasdaq rose 2.1%.

First up, let's go through some of the big AI news from this week.

Let's talk about the chipmaker Broadcom.

which got a boost from its new multi-billion dollar deal with OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT.

The two are working together to develop and deploy custom AI chips and computing systems as part of this massive deal.

And we've talked on this podcast recently about OpenAI's big announcements with NVIDIA, Advanced Micro Devices, and now Broadcom.