US EQUITY OPEN: Stocks open contained as DELL surges ahead of AVGO earnings after-hours

OPEN: US indices opened mixed, as the DJIA and RUT see strength, NDX sees pressur, while the SPX is more-or-less flat. Sectors see a downward bias as Utilities and Real Estate lag, with Materials and Health sitting atop of the pile. Dell had a stellar quarter, and guidance. Data wise, ADP slightly fell against an expected rise, and Fed's Williams said that rates are in a good place to balance the Fed’s dual mandate and reiterated his support for the previous decision to hold, with future policy dependent on the totality of incoming data. The Dollar is pretty contained against G10 peers; the Yen is the clear gainer and recently saw a bout of strength with no headline catalyst as USD/JPY fell from 159.58 to a low of 158.21. Meanwhile, the Kiwi is the notable underperformer after the RBNZ failed to impress hawkish expectations. The Loonie was largely unchanged in conclusion of the BoC, whereby they held rates as expected. WTI and Brent is lower by c. USD 0.60/bbl and comes as US/Iran continued to trade strikes overnight; modest crude downside was seen as Saudi Foreign Ministry noted it has urged all parties to remain calm, halt escalations and respect international law and return to negotiations. Treasuries are eking out gains, but have traded pretty sideways in recent trade, while precious metals sit in the green. Ahead, Fed's Beige Book and earnings after-hours from Broadcom are the notable scheduled risk events. Fed's Waller (Thurs) and NFP (Fri) are the highlights later in the week.

• Dell (DELL): EPS & rev. smashed exp. alongside sharply raising FY outlook
• Nvidia (NVDA) nears USD 14bln Hugging Face acquisition
• Palo Alto Networks (PANW) reversed lower despite beat & strong guidance
• Gitlab (GTLB): Quarterly metrics beat with strong FY guidance.
• Uber (UBER): Said to be cutting 3.3k jobs amid an overall to cut management layers.
• SiriusXM (SIRI): Upgraded at Deutsche Bank.

Session notes of this kind are snapshots, not catalysts; the durable reads are the ones that describe positioning ahead of known risk rather than the noise within the day. The structure here is a familiar one: a contained index tape with single-name dispersion, where one large-cap beat (Dell, with raised guidance) does the heavy lifting for sentiment while the broader sector mix skews negative, a pattern that has tended to mark late-cycle earnings seasons where idiosyncratic results drive flows more than macro. Two FX threads stand out as the follow-ons: the Yen strengthening on no headline catalyst, which in past episodes has invited questions about official involvement or repositioning into rate-event risk, and the Kiwi underperforming after a central bank failed to validate hawkish pricing, the standard sequence being a give-back of the pre-meeting premium rather than a fresh trend. The semis complex is the axis for the after-hours, with Broadcom's print the immediate test of whether the Dell-driven optimism in AI-adjacent hardware generalises or stays stock-specific; the calendar then hands over to the Beige Book, further Fed commentary and the payrolls release, which historically reasserts macro over micro. Rates and crude are both quiet relative to the geopolitical backdrop, and divergence of that kind between the tape and the headlines has tended to resolve through the data rather than the rhetoric.