On September 29, U.S. President Trump stated that Iran is facing severe defeat and will soon come to an end. Oil prices will drop significantly.

U.S. President Trump: To sign a strong executive order on artificial intelligence. (Jin Shi)

On September 29, Vlad Tenev, co-founder of Robinhood, announced that the U.S. SEC issued a no-action letter to Tesla on the same day, removing obstacles for its plan to empower retail investors in shareholder voting. Tenev stated that when millions of individuals hold shares in a public company, they should be able to exercise their voting rights more conveniently. His team is collaborating with Tesla to implement the project and has already provided features within the app for shareholder information access, retail voting, and real-time Q&A during earnings calls, with more tools to be launched in the future.

On September 29, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration has launched an AI-driven tool, which developers claim will serve as a 'digital steward' for the federal government, aimed at modernizing the relationship between citizens and the government. The tool was deployed on the America.gov website, which officially went live on Tuesday, with the goal of becoming a unified entry point for all federal public services. Joe Gebbia, head of the White House National Design Studio and co-founder of Airbnb, stated that this portal will set the 'standards that a superpower should have.'

On September 29, Axios reported that OpenAI's annual recurring revenue is nearing $70 billion.

On September 29, the yield on U.S. 30-year Treasury bonds reached 5.587%, the highest level since May 2004.

On September 29, Bitwise announced that the cryptocurrency asset management firm Bitwise (with client assets of $9 billion) has listed the Bitwise NEAR ETF (ticker NRR) on the NYSE Arca, making it the first spot NEAR exchange-traded product (ETP) in the United States. The fund began trading on September 29, 2026, with a management fee of 0.75%, providing exposure to spot NEAR and plans to stake the NEAR tokens held by the fund. NEAR serves as a blockchain infrastructure for the AI economy, with block times of approximately 1.2 seconds and transaction costs of less than one cent. Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan stated that NEAR is at the intersection of two major technological trends: AI and cryptocurrency.

On September 29, U.S. stock markets opened with mixed results. The Nasdaq rose by 0.33%, the S&P 500 increased by 0.14%, while the Dow Jones fell by 0.04%. AMD saw a 1.5% increase after announcing an $8.2 billion acquisition of World Labs, with Fei-Fei Li set to become AMD's Chief Scientist. Meta rose by 1.3%, officially launching a corporate platform to provide AI technology to businesses and developers. SpaceX's stock increased by over 1% as its Starship successfully entered Earth's orbit for the first time, deploying 26 V3 Starlink satellites.

On September 29, CNBC reported that trading firm Raven has completed strategic financing at a $90 million pre-money valuation, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and CMCC Global. Raven was founded in 2023 by three former Wintermute employees, initially providing liquidity for cryptocurrency trading and planning to expand into prediction markets starting in the second quarter of 2025. Co-founder Petar Kostov stated that smaller platforms often struggle to find liquidity partners, while larger platforms may not have enough liquidity to meet demand. The seed round was led by Hack VC, with participation from Wintermute Ventures.

On September 29, a recent report released by ETFGI, an independent research and consulting firm for ETFs, revealed that as of the end of August 2026, the global active management ETF assets reached $2.72 trillion, with net inflows amounting to $66.36 billion, both hitting historical highs. In terms of growth, the asset size of global active management ETFs has increased by 42.6% year-to-date, highlighting the sustained demand from investors for these products. ETFGI noted that a significant portion of the inflows can be attributed to the top 20 ETFs/ETPs ranked by net new assets, which collectively saw an inflow of $25.39 billion in August. The top three on this list are: Avantis U.S. Large Cap Value ETF, with a monthly net inflow of $3.41 billion; Yinhua Daily ETF, with a monthly net inflow of $2.66 billion; and ProShares GENIUS Money Market ETF, with a monthly net inflow of $2.145 billion. (China Fund News)