Good morning. Robinhood would like more of your spare time. FICO investors would like Tuesday back. And FactSet is selling more financial data while keeping less profit from each dollar of sales.

Micron reports after the close. Before that, we get an inflation report, revised GDP and a White House announcement with no confirmed topic.

A quick apology: the Anthropic article link in yesterday’s email returned an error. We should have caught that before sending. Here’s the Reuters report via The Business Standard.

BEFORE THE BELL

September 30 · December futures · 7:30 a.m. ET · Delayed about 10 minutes. Changes as reported by Yahoo Finance.

THE BIG STORY · HOOD

Robinhood wants your weekends, too.

Robinhood. Planned weekend trading service.

Robinhood wants customers to trade stocks on Saturdays and Sundays. Weekend trading in selected stocks and ETFs is planned for early 2027, subject to regulatory review. This Saturday is still yours.

Tuesday night’s Summit gave customers plenty else to look through:

• More hours: extended options trading and perpetual futures for eligible U.S. customers.
• AI agents: tools that research and trade, with trade approval on by default for agentic accounts. Customers can change that setting.
• More borrowing: eligible customers can opt into four times intraday buying power, up from twice today. Linked take-profit and stop-loss orders arrive for equities in October.

More than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts, the company says. That gives Robinhood an audience to sell these features to, though it doesn't tell us how much extra trading they will generate.

For shareholders, more activity means more opportunities to earn transaction revenue, interest and subscription fees. The test comes after launch: do customers keep using the products, and can weekend trading attract enough buyers and sellers? Four times the buying power also gives losses more room to grow. Rollout dates and eligibility.

IN FOCUS · FICO

FICO lost a quarter of its value.

Coolcaesar / Wikimedia Commons. San Jose office, 2020. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Fair Isaac closed Tuesday at $617.87, down 26.52%. A company that makes credit scores found itself being marked down over the price of credit scores.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s move toward comparable treatment of VantageScore and FICO scores makes it easier for mortgage lenders to consider an alternative, according to Yahoo Finance.

Then came a price: 99 cents. TransUnion will keep standalone VantageScore 4.0 mortgage-origination scores at that price through December 2028. That buys the score, not the borrower’s entire credit report.

For FICO, competition threatens both volume and pricing. Even lenders that stay put have a cheaper alternative to bring to negotiations. That puts pressure on the future profits investors had been willing to pay for.

Switching still takes testing, implementation and confidence in the new model. FICO has established customer relationships and workflows on its side. The next useful numbers are adoption rates and any pricing response from FICO. TransUnion’s pricing commitment.

JUST REPORTED · FDS

FactSet grew. Its margins went the other way.

FactSet. Workstation product image; illustrative screen data.

FactSet’s morning results show healthy sales growth and a more expensive business to run.

Fourth-quarter revenue rose 6.3% to $634.7 million, with organic revenue up 7.1%. Adjusted earnings reached $4.52 a share, up 11.6%. But adjusted operating margin fell to 33.0% from 33.8% a year earlier.

Compensation and technology spending squeezed the profit kept from each dollar of sales.

Organic annual subscription value reached $2.57 billion, up 7%. ASV estimates the next 12 months of revenue from subscriptions currently supplied. Management said the ASV added by AI solutions more than doubled in fiscal 2026.

Buybacks helped adjusted EPS grow faster than adjusted net income. GAAP EPS fell 15.4% to $3.41, while free cash flow was roughly flat at $177.3 million.

For fiscal 2027, FactSet expects revenue of $2.600–$2.625 billion and adjusted EPS of $19.25–$19.65. Its organic ASV growth outlook is 5%–6.5%, below the latest 7% pace.

At the 9 a.m. ET call, listen for when AI sales start covering more of the cost of delivering them. Results and guidance (PDF).

THE STOCK BOARD

Where big tech finished

Tuesday, September 29 close · USD · Daily change

Mag 7 plus AMD, Broadcom and Micron. C&C’s editorial watchlist.

Meta led this group; Apple had the largest decline. The Nasdaq-100 ETF, QQQ, gained 0.19%, while the S&P 500 ETF, SPY, slipped 0.18%. The mixed finish leaves room for individual company news to matter this morning.

AI & BUSINESS · AMZN / GOOGL

Amazon and Google help sell Claude, too.

TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons. Dario Amodei, 2023. CC BY 2.0.

Reuters reports that 47% of Anthropic’s 2025 sales—about $2.16 billion—went through Amazon and Google’s cloud marketplaces.

That is distribution dependence. It does not mean Amazon and Google themselves bought 47% of Anthropic’s output.

Those channels bring Claude to businesses already buying cloud services. The cost: about $351 million in distribution fees, roughly 16 cents per dollar sold through them.

For AMZN and GOOGL shareholders, that adds distribution income to the computing bill. For Anthropic investors, two important suppliers and investors also control major routes to customers—and sell competing models. Reuters explains the arrangements.

AROUND THE MARKET · CCL

Carnival’s customers are still booking.

kees torn / Wikimedia Commons. Mardi Gras, 2020. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Carnival jumped 13.41% Tuesday, lifting Royal Caribbean 7.45% and Norwegian 3.42%. The company’s results gave investors a reason to look past higher fuel costs: bookings for 2027 were running at records for both occupancy and prices.

Customer deposits reached $7.6 billion, up $500 million from the previous third-quarter record. Those deposits are cash collected ahead of trips, not revenue already earned. They nevertheless offer a useful check on whether customers are putting money behind their travel plans.

Carnival also cut fuel use per available berth day by 3.8%. Better efficiency and stronger pricing helped absorb the cost of keeping ships moving. The question now is how much of that cushion survives if fuel stays expensive. The results include bookings, deposits and fuel assumptions.

OVERNIGHT · BA

Boeing gets the Navy’s call.

NAVAIR / Boeing. Artist’s rendering; approved for public release.

After Tuesday’s close, the U.S. Navy selected Boeing for the F/A-XX, its next-generation carrier-based fighter. Boeing described a multibillion-dollar award without giving an exact value in its announcement.

It adds another long-running defense program alongside the Air Force’s F-47. Development contracts take years to turn into delivered aircraft and profits, so the award’s size alone won’t settle questions about eventual returns. Boeing’s announcement and aircraft rendering.

ON THE RADAR

Two more worth knowing

Tesla has arranged $30 billion of borrowing capacity. The facilities were undrawn when disclosed, and Tesla said it did not currently plan to draw them in 2026. This gives the company financing flexibility; it isn’t $30 billion of new cash already spent. The filing breakdown.

Apple may speed up its release schedule. Bloomberg reports that CEO John Ternus wants quicker launches and fewer management layers. The potential payoff is getting products to customers sooner; frequent launches still need products people want. The reported plans.

EARNINGS AHEAD · MU / NKE

Micron tonight. Nike tomorrow.

Thingreenline4546 / Wikimedia Commons. Taichung, 2023. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Micron’s call is at 4:30 p.m. ET today. Its prior-quarter revenue was $41.46 billion; management’s latest outlook put this quarter at $50 billion, plus or minus $1 billion. That is company guidance, not a reported result.

Listen for how much growth comes from higher memory prices, how much from shipping more, and what high-bandwidth memory demand means for future margins. Capacity spending matters because today’s shortages can eventually encourage tomorrow’s extra supply. Micron’s official call notice.

Brandon Carson; crop by Another Believer / Wikimedia Commons. Nike campus, 2010. CC BY 2.0.

Nike reports Thursday at about 4:15 p.m. ET, with a 5 p.m. call. The questions are more familiar: is Greater China stabilizing, are wholesale relationships improving, and is less discounting helping gross margin? An improvement in revenue is worth less if promotions swallow the profit. The regional mix and margin outlook will tell us more about the recovery. Nike’s official earnings notice.

UPGRADES, DOWNGRADES & TARGETS

The Street changes its numbers

PepsiCo — downgrade, September 29. JPMorgan moved from Overweight to Neutral and cut its target from $170 to $138. Its concern was that the North American recovery had stalled while costs rose. Rating history.

Best Buy — target increase, September 29. Evercore ISI raised its target from $85 to $90, keeping its In Line rating. That’s a higher valuation estimate, not a rating upgrade. The analyst record.

MACRO IN A MINUTE

Two times to keep handy

8:30 a.m. ET: August personal income and spending, including PCE inflation, plus the third estimate of second-quarter GDP and the annual update. For stocks, inflation can alter expectations for rates and the returns investors demand from future profits. BEA’s schedule.

3:30 p.m. ET: Trump is scheduled to make an announcement with the Commerce Secretary. The public calendar doesn’t establish the topic, so we’re not calling it a trade or tariff announcement in advance. The published schedule.

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