U.S. Midterm Elections Drive Three Key Market Themes: AI Investment, Fiscal Deficit, and Debt Ceiling

The World Gold Council’s Q3 2026 Global Gold Demand Trends report, released on November 3, shows that global physical gold ETFs returned to net inflows in the third quarter, totaling 211 tons, pushing gold ETF holdings to a record high of 4,256 tons. Over-the-counter and other gold demand stood at 143 tons, up from 101 tons in the same period last year. Additionally, global central banks net-purchased 321 tons of gold in Q3, marking the fastest pace of gold buying since the end of 2024. Year-to-date, central banks’ cumulative net gold purchases have reached 675 tons, slightly higher than the level in the same period last year.

动察 Beating AI Flash News: The Financial Times cites anonymous sources saying Nvidia is requiring global data center and cloud computing partners to sell at least 51% of their computing power services to non-Chinese clients. The requirement was communicated verbally to sales teams starting this summer, with no written documentation currently in place, and applies only to future business—existing signed leases remain unaffected. Previously, the U.S. restricted the export of advanced GPUs to China, but Chinese firms could still access high-end computing power via overseas cloud providers. For instance, chips are deployed in data centers in Singapore, Malaysia and other regions, with Chinese companies accessing them remotely via the internet, no need to ship GPUs back to China. This has been a key channel for some Chinese AI enterprises to obtain advanced computing power. Nvidia already tightened rules once in July this year, cutting the list of Asian customers approved to purchase AI chips by half, with a focus on reviewing cloud service providers that specialize in renting out GPUs. Staff even conduct on-site inspections of data centers, verify contracts and interview end users. Now the restrictions have expanded to the end buyers of computing power. Some Southeast Asian cloud providers are heavily dependent on Chinese clients, making it difficult to secure enough non-Chinese buyers in the short term. Some surveyed cloud providers worry they may have to scale back their data center operations if they fail to meet the requirement.

London-listed technology company The Smarter Web Company has announced a preferred stock dividend for its MORE shares, set at ￡0.2301 per share for the week ending November 6, 2026. Key dividend dates are: record date November 6, ex-dividend date November 5, and payment date November 23. The preferred stock currently carries an annual dividend yield of 12%, based on a ￡100 par value. As of the announcement date, 111,137 of the 211,112 issued shares are eligible to receive the dividend; the remaining shares are held by Tennyson Capital via an ATM facility and have waived dividend rights until they are sold. The company will provide a further update on the matter on November 5.

Consensys has launched Sovereign Network Interoperability, a technology stack for connecting independently operated financial ledgers. The firm states that the product supports collateral movement, Delivery versus Payment (DvP) securities settlement, cross-currency payments, and tokenized money market fund transactions.

Beating AI Flash News: The New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel have filed two separate lawsuits against Brave, alleging that the company scraped news content without authorization, then provided it via paid APIs to AI firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, and Mistral for model training or generating user responses. Brave’s LLM Context API can directly return full webpage text. Plaintiffs’ tests found that for a 1,295-word New York Times article, the API returned 1,291 words, nearly the full text. Brave’s in-house AI search is also accused of mass copying news content. The browser also features a built-in paywall blocker that helps users bypass some media’s paywalls. Brave’s search engine has indexed over 30 billion web pages, but its crawlers do not identify themselves, instead masquerading as regular browsers to access sites. Brave explained that some websites only allow Google to crawl content, so it uses this approach to avoid being blocked. Previously, Brave had sued News Corp, parent company of The Wall Street Journal, arguing that search indexes and summaries constitute fair use. News Corp filed a counterclaim in July this year. Now the four newspapers are seeking a court order to halt Brave’s relevant practices and award damages.

Binance announced in an official statement that it has now re-opened withdrawals for the following assets: Additional assets restored on the Ethereum (ETH) network: ENA, USDE, PENDLE, WLD, QNT, SHIB, ZRO, FET, NIL, ONDO, ALT, SKY, LINK, ETHFI, REZ, JASMY, PUNDIX, BTC, BAT, STRK, POL, ANIME, LSK, RE, BREV, RLC, AMP, PLUME, BLUR, WBETH, ZBT, ENSO, AVA, TUSD. Additional assets restored on the Solana (SOL) network: USD1, PUMP, FDUSD, BMT, RENDER, RAY, TRUMP, MET, PENGU, JUP, PYTH, BONK, KMNO, BNSOL, ORCA, WIF, W, HUMA, JTO, IO, 2Z, BOME. Previously restored assets on the Ethereum network include RLUSD, USD1, TUSD, FDUSD, and XUSD. Binance added that as security checks are completed, it will gradually resume withdrawals for more assets and networks, with further updates to be released via official channels.