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Cash & Chaos
October 13: Goldman’s traders deliver. UnitedHealth raises its outlook.
Oct 13, 2026
October 13: Goldman’s traders deliver. UnitedHealth raises its outlook.
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0:00
Welcome to Cash and Chaos. October thirteenth, twenty twenty-six. Goldman's traders deliver. UnitedHealth raises its outlook. Good morning. Goldman's equities business just put up a seventy-two percent revenue jump.
0:16
UnitedHealth raised its profit outlook, and Visa finally has permission to start preparing a domestic business in China. Earnings season has given us something to work with.
0:26
Also inside, Microsoft's plan to run more AI on its own chips, Disney's bid for a piece of character.ai, and a three hundred million dollar investment in the less glamorous business of checking that chips actually work.
0:41
Before the bell, minus zero point zero nine percent S&P five hundred and seven thousand eight hundred and fifty-one point zero zero.
0:50
Minus zero point seven three percent NASDAQ one hundred and thirty thousand six hundred and seventy-two point zero zero.
0:57
Plus zero point five two percent Dow fifty-two thousand three hundred and eighty-two point zero zero. December futures October thirteenth, seven twenty-six AM Eastern Time delayed Yahoo Finance quotes.
1:11
Change versus prior close. Stock pre-market snapshots below use the stated times. Zero one slash bank earnings. Goldman's traders earn their bonuses. 2009 RFA. Z Ford dude slash Wikimedia public domain.
1:29
Goldman Sachs reported seventeen dollars and one cent a share in third-quarter earnings on eighteen point six eight billion dollars of revenue.
1:38
Revenue rose twenty-three percent from a year earlier, topped the sixteen point eight seven billion dollars Zacks consensus, and net earnings reached five point two nine billion dollars.
1:49
The standout was equities, six point four four billion dollars of revenue, up seventy-two percent.
1:56
For Goldman Sachs, revenue was eighteen point six eight billion dollars, compared with seventeen dollars and one cent for reported earnings per share.
2:06
For JP Morgan, revenue was fifty point one seven billion dollars, compared with five dollars and fifty-seven cents for reported earnings per share.
2:16
For Wells Fargo, revenue was twenty-one point eight seven billion dollars, compared with one dollar and eighty-seven cents for reported earnings per share.
2:26
Revenue and diluted earnings per share on reported accounting basis. JP Morgan revenue is reported net revenue, not its managed revenue measure. USD.
2:38
Goldman revenue consensus, sixteen point eight seven billion dollars, retrieved October thirteenth. Estimate last updated October sixth. Data provided by Zacks Investment Research Incorporated, www.zacksdata.com.
2:55
Pre-market, Goldman nine hundred and eighteen dollars plus two point six nine percent at seven thirty-six AM Eastern Time.
3:04
JP Morgan three hundred and thirty-seven dollars plus zero point eight one percent at seven thirty-six AM Eastern Time.
3:12
Wells Fargo eighty-two dollars and thirty-eight cents minus one point one three percent at seven thirty-six AM Eastern Time. These are early snapshots before the earnings calls.
3:24
Goldman's equity financing and derivatives businesses drove that surge. Helping clients finance positions and trade around a volatile market can be lucrative even when buying and holding stocks feels much less rewarding.
3:39
Investment banking fees added another three point two two billion dollars, up twenty-one percent, helped by completed mergers and stock offerings.
3:49
Asset and wealth management produced five point zero five billion dollars, up fourteen percent.
3:56
Fixed income, currency, and commodities revenue was roughly flat at three point four seven billion dollars, so this was not a uniform surge across every trading desk. The expense line moved too.
4:10
Operating costs rose twenty percent to eleven point three one billion dollars. Revenue grew faster, supporting an eighteen point seven percent annualized return on equity.
4:22
Goldman also bought back three billion dollars of shares during the quarter and declared a five dollar quarterly dividend. The wrinkle is the pipeline.
4:32
Its investment banking fee backlog fell from the previous quarter and was slightly below year-end twenty twenty-five. A strong batch of completed deals pays today's bills.
4:43
Replacing those deals determines how much fee income follows. JP Morgan and Wells Fargo tell us more about the lending side.
4:51
JP Morgan reported twenty-seven point zero four billion dollars of net interest income and two point seven four billion dollars of credit provisions.
5:01
Its adjusted earnings per share was five dollars and seventy-five cents versus five dollars and fifty-seven cents reported.
5:09
Wells Fargo generated twelve point five two billion dollars of net interest income and set aside one point zero three billion dollars for credit losses.
5:19
Provisions reduce current earnings to account for expected loan losses. They're not all cash losses incurred this quarter. For Goldman, the immediate test is whether elevated client activity continues.
5:32
For the lenders, listen for deposit costs, credit quality, and the outlook for interest income. JP Morgan's call is at eight thirty AM Eastern Time, Goldman's at nine thirty, and Wells Fargo's at ten.
5:46
Zero two slash healthcare UNH. UnitedHealth raises the bar for the year. 2024 RFA. Chad Davis slash Wikimedia CC by two point zero.
6:00
UnitedHealth lifted its full year adjusted earnings per share outlook to at least twenty dollars and fifty cents from nineteen dollars and fifty cents to twenty dollars previously.
6:11
Third quarter adjusted earnings per share was four dollars and sixty-nine cents on one hundred and twelve point seven billion dollars of revenue.
6:20
The stock traded at three hundred and eighty-seven dollars, plus two-point-two-four percent at seven:thirty-six AM Eastern Time.
6:28
The insurance company's medical care ratio came in at eighty-eight point four percent versus eighty-nine point nine percent a year earlier. That measures how much premium revenue goes toward medical costs.
6:42
A lower ratio leaves more room to cover administrative expenses and earn a profit.
6:47
There is an important contribution inside the improvement, six hundred and ten million dollars of favorable prior period reserve development related to twenty twenty-six service dates.
6:58
In plain English, some earlier claims are now expected to cost less than the company previously allowed for.
7:06
That helps this quarter's result but should not be mistaken for a permanent reduction in the cost of every new claim. UnitedHealthcare generated two point eight billion of operating earnings.
7:19
Optum contributed three point seven billion dollars. At the group level, operating earnings were six point six billion dollars, and operating cash flow was five point one billion dollars.
7:31
These business revenues overlap through internal transactions, so adding their sales together would overstate the group size. The stronger outlook matters more than simply clearing a quarterly earnings estimate.
7:45
Management is carrying the improvement into its forecast for the full year, while the reserve detail tells us to be careful about extrapolating the entire quarterly benefit.
7:56
For shareholders, the next useful evidence is how pricing and medical utilization develop together. Insurance premiums are set before the final bill for treatment is known.
8:07
A company can grow enrollment and revenue while earning less if claims run ahead of what those premiums were designed to cover. Today's release offers a more encouraging view of that equation.
8:20
The follow-through to watch is whether the underlying claims experience supports the higher earnings floor as the company moves into its next pricing cycle. No latzi lomitko payment though.
8:32
Visa gets a way into China's domestic market. Dua ribo dua puluh lima archife. Sarah Stierch slash Wikimedia (public domain). China has approved Visa's application to prepare a domestic bank card clearing business.
8:47
Visa shares traded at three hundred and ninety-five dollars and forty-two cents, plus one point five eight percent, at seven:twenty-seven AM Eastern Time. The permission starts a regulatory process.
9:00
It does not mean Visa can switch on domestic processing today. The People's Bank of China has allowed the company to begin formal preparations for a domestic clearing institution.
9:11
AP reports that preparatory work must be completed within a year, after which Visa would need to apply to begin operating. For a US payments company, that is a meaningful opening.
9:22
Domestic purchases create a different pool of potential business from transactions involving travelers or merchants across borders. Visa will be trying to win a place in payments that begin and end inside China.
9:36
The commercial work still comes after the regulatory milestone. Banks and merchants need reasons to use the network, and Visa has to build a business that earns more than it costs to establish and run.
9:49
Access to a large market is valuable. The revenue depends on actual participation and payment volume. Visa's announcement provides no launch date, transaction volume forecast, or estimate of the earnings contribution.
10:03
We would therefore treat this as an expansion of its future opportunity rather than a reason to pencil a sudden revenue jump into the next quarter.
10:13
The timing also gives investors a concrete corporate development to track alongside the broader U.S.China trade relationship. The next milestones are operational approval and commercial partnerships.
10:27
Those will tell us how much business follows the diplomatic progress. Mag seven plus three. Where big tech finished. Monday, October twelfth, regular close USD daily change.
10:40
Mag seven plus AMD, Broadcom, and Micron, our editorial watchlist. In the watchlist for this recorded session, four stocks rose and six fell. Micron fell three point eight percent.
10:55
Meta rose three point three eight percent. AMD fell two point two eight percent. AI Barra Microsoft. Microsoft wants more Copilot answers running on its own chips. Dua ribo numbela archife.
11:12
Cool Caesar slash Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0. Microsoft plans multi-gigawatt deployments of its Maia chips starting in twenty twenty-seven, making them the primary inference system for its own products and services.
11:28
Maia two hundred already handles production workloads including Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft Foundry are due to follow by year-end.
11:37
Inference is the work of running a trained model when somebody asks it to do something. Every answer has a computing cost.
11:46
Serving more answers with the same power and hardware budget would help Microsoft's economics as usage grows. Maia three hundred is due in twenty twenty-seven.
11:56
Microsoft expects it to deliver forty percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems. That is the company's performance claim rather than an independent comparison.
12:08
The announced scope is Microsoft's own products and services. Azure customers still have different hardware and model needs.
12:16
For NVIDIA investors, the relevant pressure is a major customer developing alternatives for workloads it knows especially well.
12:25
Microsoft is taking on the cost of designing chips to gain more control over the cost of serving AI.
12:31
Whether that pays off will show up in deployment, utilization, and margins, not simply in how impressive the specifications look. AI/character.ai Disney.
12:42
Disney offers twenty million dollars as character.ai heads to court. 2040+ RHFE. Cool Caesar/Wikimedia CC BY-SA four point zero.
12:56
Character.ai filed for Chapter Eleven protection and agreed to a twenty million dollar opening bid from a Disney affiliate for certain rights and assets. The proposed transaction also includes transition services.
13:10
The precise terms matter. Disney would receive a non-exclusive perpetual license to certain intellectual property and certain claims.
13:19
This is not an announced purchase of the entire character.ai platform for twenty million dollars.
13:26
Disney is the proposed stalking horse bidder, the initial offer against which better bids can compete in the court-supervised process.
13:34
Character.ai expects the sale process and resulting transactions to finish in late November or early December. The platform is expected to keep operating during that process.
13:46
But the company says it will wind down if the sale does not produce a buyer that continues the service. For Disney, the attraction is access to technology and rights through a defined transaction.
13:58
For character.ai users and creditors, the bigger unresolved question is who, if anyone, funds the platform's continued operation. The twenty million dollar headline alone does not answer that. Chips/Teradyne FormFactor.
14:14
Teradyne puts three hundred million behind chip testing. Teradyne offices. Teradyne agreed to make a three hundred million dollar equity investment in FormFactor alongside a collaboration announced after Monday's close.
14:30
The deal still requires customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. FormFactor supplies probing interfaces and measurement technology. Teradyne makes automated testing equipment.
14:44
Their plan is to help customers move increasingly complicated chips from development into high volume production. The target applications include advanced packaging, high bandwidth memory, and silicon photonics.
14:57
These technologies need to work together reliably. Finding a defective component before it is built into a more expensive system can save the customer considerably more than the cost of the test.
15:09
The financial opportunity is in the equipment and services needed to support that production. The announcement gives us a capital commitment and a collaboration, but no new revenue forecast or guaranteed order total.
15:24
Watch for customer deployments that turn the partnership into sales. Macro. Tomorrow, inflation gets its turn. September CPI arrives Wednesday, October fourteenth at eight thirty AM Eastern Time.
15:40
Producer prices follow Thursday at the same time. Today's bank results tell us how companies earned money through September.
15:48
These releases can change the interest rate assumptions investors use to value the next few quarters. For stock investors, watch the response in bond yields alongside the headline inflation number.
16:00
Higher discount rates can weigh on richly valued growth companies even when their own sales are holding up. Prediction markets. A pause still leads.
16:10
Polymarket's October Fed contracts implied about eighty point five percent for no change and eighteen point five percent for a quarter point increase at the seven thirty-six AM Eastern Time check.
16:24
These are market prices, not a Fed forecast. Small probabilities were also assigned to other outcomes. Upgrades/downgrades. The Street changes its mind.
16:35
RTX, Deutsche Bank cut its rating to hold from buy with a two hundred and eight dollar target. Reported October thirteenth.
16:43
Adobe, HSBC cut buy to hold and its target to two hundred and sixty-seven dollars from three hundred and ten dollars. The report published today describes the action as Monday's. Read the reasoning.
16:56
A rating change is a change in the analyst's recommendation. A price target is their valuation estimate. Neither is a promised return. Crypto snapshot. Bitcoin holds near eighty-three thousand four hundred dollars.
17:11
Bitcoin eighty-three thousand three hundred and sixty-two dollars, Ether two thousand five hundred and one dollars from Coinbase spot prices retrieved at seven thirty-six AM Eastern Time.
17:23
These are point-in-time prices, not daily returns.
17:27
Coinbase shares one hundred and eighty-two dollars and forty-eight cents plus one point one six percent at seven thirty-two AM Eastern Time pre-market versus Monday's one hundred and eighty dollars and thirty-nine cent close.
17:41
For the stock, trading activity and the fees it generates matter alongside the direction of crypto prices. That's cash and chaos. Find the full edition and original sources in the show notes.
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