Lana

Then, once you factor in the extra work of checking how easily a certain bond trades and how solid its issuers really are, corporate debt can feel like a lot of effort for only a small extra reward.

That's it for today.

I'm Lana.

I'll see you next week.

Hey, I'm Lana with your Daily Brief for Friday, January 16th.

Coming up, TSMC's profit sailed past analysts' expectations, bolstering investors' confidence in the whole AI chips thing.

And the UK economy grew by the most since June.

We'll also check in with Carl to get his answers to your burning questions.

More on the way, but first, a word from Guy at Finimize HQ.

TSMC reported better than expected results on Thursday, reassuring investors who needed to see the AI money to believe the hype.

The world's biggest contract chip maker posted its highest ever quarterly profit, up 35% from the same period the previous year.

That beat analyst forecasts by a good 5% and further encouraged investors, hot on the heels of TSMC's sneak peak revenue beat last week.

Looking ahead, the firm thinks this quarter's sales will land about 38% higher than the same time last year.

Good thing too, it plans to splash up to 56 billion on new plants and technology this year, almost a third more than last year.

And further out, TSMC now expects revenue from AI chips to grow about 55% a year through 2029, a full 10 percentage points faster than it was predicting before.

TSMC makes around 90% of the world's most advanced chips, so its outlook is a pretty good proxy for the AI industry's health.

If you've got money riding on that, you'll be glad to hear the firm's boss is sounding confident that orders will keep rolling in, from chip designers like Nvidia and AMD and cloud giants like Google and Amazon.

Now, he did warn that tariffs could throw a wrench in the works, but the U.S.

is considering cutting duties on Taiwanese chip exports from 20% to 15%, on account of TSMC's plan to invest $165 billion into a cluster of stateside plants.

TSMC's strong results and optimistic outlook gave the whole chip sector a lift.