ServiceNow Inc. (NYSE:NOW) is among the most fantastic stocks every investor should pay attention to. On October 30, BMO Capital analyst Keith Bachman reiterated his Buy rating on the company with an unchanged price target of $1,150, following the company’s Q3 2025 results a day earlier.
While Bachman called the Q3 results strong, with both subscription revenue and current remaining performance obligations (cRPO*) surpassing expectations, subscription revenue growth guidance for Q4 was below expectations. However, he believes that ServiceNow’s expanding AI capabilities and well-established portfolio position it for continued momentum.
ServiceNow Inc.’s (NOW) Sustainable Growth Trajectory and Pipeline Strength Impresses BMO Capital
The analyst also argued that the company’s growth is sustainable, given its ability to win large deal sizes, achieve higher attach rates, and maintain a healthy sales pipeline. His conviction is further supported by the management’s raised guidance for cash flow generation, including higher operating and free cash flow margins, as well as subscription revenue.
In its Q3 results, ServiceNow Inc. (NYSE:NOW) experienced broad-based demand across the platform and solid execution, which contributed to a 20.5% year-over-year growth in subscription revenue (on a constant currency basis) to $3.3 billion. RPO increased by 23% to $24.3 billion, and cRPO rose 20.5% to $11.35 billion, driven by strong momentum in industries such as transportation, logistics, retail, and hospitality. Supported by improved operating leverage, adjusted operating margin expanded by 250 basis points year-over-year to 33.5%, leading to an adjusted EPS of $4.82, which came in 13% ahead of consensus.
ServiceNow Inc. (NYSE:NOW) also announced that its board has authorized a 5-for-1 stock split, which will be submitted to shareholders for approval at a special meeting on December 5. The split is expected to increase the stock’s appeal and make the stock price more affordable for investors who wish to gain exposure to AI through the company.
As for the share price, the performance has been weak so far, with a YTD decline of nearly 19%.
*cRPO—contract revenue that will be recognized as revenue in the next 12 months
ServiceNow Inc. (NYSE:NOW) provides cloud-based platforms for digital workflows, enabling organizations to automate and optimize their business processes. The company’s Now Platform offers solutions across IT service management, customer service, HR, and other areas.
While we acknowledge the potential of NOW as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you’re looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.
The OECD classifies national R&D investment by focus area, such as defense, environment, and health. “Industrial production and technology” refers to research aimed at increasing economic efficiency and competitiveness. This includes, for example, R&D to develop new machinery or production processes that enhance manufacturing output. Such investments are critical, enabling national industrial competitiveness.
A few countries invest a relatively large share of their overall government R&D budgets in industrial production and technology, such as Iceland, Israel, and Belgium (each investing 33 percent or more). While the overall OECD average is 12 percent, the United States invests far less, ranking 34th out of 36 OECD countries.
The U.S. government invests just over 1 percent of its federal research budget in industrial production and technology. For comparison, the United Kingdom invests 5.5 percent, Australia invests 6 percent, and Canada invests 12.5 percent. (See figure 1.)
Figure 1: Share of total federal R&D invested in industrial production and technology (2024, unless otherwise noted)
*: 2023 data used for Chile, Israel, and Korea; 2022 data used for Canada and UK; 2020 data used for Colombia
To avoid losing even more industrial competitiveness to China, the United States must boost government R&D investment and devote a significant share of that increase to industrial production and technology. A reasonable goal would be to invest at least 10 percent of its federal research budget by 2028. Absent such a shift, China will continue expanding its lead in the technologies that determine future industrial capacity and geopolitical leverage, leaving the United States less able to compete.
(Bloomberg) — A resurgence in tech shares spurred a rebound in stocks, though the advance was limited by concerns over the Federal Reserve’s ability to slash interest rates in December. Bonds fell.
The relief brought by the end of the US shutdown quickly gave way to volatility this week as a host of Fed speakers threw cold water on bets for further policy easing. Hot areas favored by momentum traders such as artificial-intelligence and Bitcoin whipsawed. While the S&P 500 erased a 1.4% slide, most of its shares fell. Nvidia Corp. rallied ahead of its earnings.
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The outlook for lower rates favoring Corporate America alongside booming AI prospects have powered a torrid surge since the April meltdown, making many traders look past high valuations to keep chasing the market higher.
Earnings for most big tech companies have been in line or above expectations, though the outlook has been murky when it comes to where borrowing costs are headed. As Nvidia gets ready to report Wednesday, options traders are pricing in a 6.2% stock swing in either direction – its highest implied move in a year.
“Its earnings will be a huge test for the markets and the AI-trade, and could either ease fears about AI valuations or inflame them considerably,” said Kyle Rodda at Capital.com.
Also next week, big box retailers like Walmart Inc. and Target Corp. will report their results, offering a read on the state of consumer spending – the main engine of the American economy.
The S&P 500 rose to 6,760 after briefly falling below its 50-day moving average. A gauge of megacaps halted a three-day rout.
The yield on 10-year Treasuries climbed two basis points to 4.14%. The dollar wavered. Bitcoin almost erased this year’s gain.
UK markets got hit as speculation about the budget heightened uncertainty over the nation’s finances. Oil climbed as geopolitical risks mount from Russia to Iran.
“Stocks should bounce back here, but the dip buyers have been burned lately, so it might be a slow move back up to regain confidence,” said Bob Lang founder of Explosive Options.
We also saw some pretty clear rotation this week into health care primarily and consumer staples – looking like they have bottomed, according to Ken Mahoney at Mahoney Asset Management.
“Not really what you want to see if you are in the AI trade or adjacent stocks,” Mahoney said. “This is a unique circumstance where it feels like a mini bear market in some stocks” even though the S&P 500 is not that far from its highs.
“The general trend has been to buy the dip, which could provide a respite,” said Melissa Brown at SimCorp. “Retail investors may be spooked temporarily, but are likely to come back in if they believe the long-term story driving many of the names that have been gutted remains intact.”
Brown notes that a real rebound, though, may have to wait until government data starts flowing again and investors get a better read on the state of the economy and inflation.
“But it will only be a recovery if the economy continues to grow and inflation does not,” she said.
A slew of Fed officials have in recent days expressed skepticism over the need for another cut in December, or outright opposed one. It remains unclear whether they can persuade enough voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee, given that a number of policymakers are still more worried about job weakness.
Financial markets have taken note of the volume of comments coming recently from the Fed’s so-called inflation hawks. Investors have marked down the odds of a rate cut in December to less than 50%, based on federal funds futures contracts. Before the Fed’s October meeting, they were almost fully pricing in a reduction.
Their remarks came less than a month after Chair Jerome Powell warned that a December cut is far from a “foregone conclusion.”
“The tough but business-as-usual wrestling match over a December rate cut risks morphing into a crisis of governance at the Fed, with implications that extend well beyond whether it does or does not cut then,” said Krishna Guha at Evercore. “Absent miraculous clarification from limited data, Powell is in a rough spot. We urge cool heads and compromise.”
Guha says that he still leans toward a “hawkish cut,” but the odds have diminished.
“Our expectation for a soft October employment report and under-control October core CPI inflation should settle the internal debate at the FOMC in favor of an additional 25 basis-point rate cut. With that said, the decision is likely to be contentious, with a high possibility of additional hawkish dissents,” said Gennadiy Goldberg at TD Securities.
Corporate Highlights:
Applied Materials Inc. suffered a sales decline last quarter and predicted another drop in the current period, though the chip-equipment maker sees demand improving in the second half of 2026. Google has offered to tweak its ad tech products to settle a European Union order after a near-€3 billion ($3.4 billion) antitrust penalty, stopping short of a partial breakup watchdogs favor. Walmart Inc. Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon, who over a decade ushered the big-box behemoth into the Internet age, will retire in February. He’ll be replaced by US head John Furner — long viewed as the heir apparent. Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. amended the contract of Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav to ensure his stock options remain eligible to vest even if the media company is sold. Merck & Co. agreed to acquire Cidara Therapeutics Inc., a biotech company developing a flu treatment, as part of its ongoing efforts to make up for the upcoming patent loss of its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda. Bristol Myers Squibb Co. fell after one of its most important experimental medicines appeared unlikely to benefit patients who had suffered a heart complication, another setback for the drugmaker’s product pipeline. Boeing Co. stands to win most of a major order from Flydubai for single-aisle aircraft, though Airbus SE still has a long-shot chance to pry some business from an airline that’s never ordered from the European planemaker. Emirates is planning to use SpaceX’s Starlink to upgrade the onboard Wi-Fi in its fleet, according to people familiar with the matter, even though the service isn’t currently approved by the government. BlackRock Inc. has agreed to pay up to €2 billion ($2.33 billion) to form a data center venture with Spanish engineering firm ACS SA. American Tower Corp. and European buyout firm EQT AB are among parties weighing bids for French tower company TDF Infrastructure, people with knowledge of the matter said. A group of First Brands Group creditors is demanding new, independent advisers for company units that issued nearly $2.5 billion in off-balance-sheet debt, claiming conflicts of interest threaten to disrupt the sprawling insolvency case of auto-parts maker. JBS NV, the world’s largest meat supplier, reported a quarterly operating loss at its US beef business as a shortage of cattle continues to hit margins at the unit. BHP Group Ltd. is liable to compensate hundreds of thousands of victims of a devastating dam collapse in Brazil, a London judge ruled, moving closer to a potential multi-billion dollar payout a decade after the disaster. Nu Holdings Ltd. said artificial intelligence features it started to deploy in Brazil helped the fintech increase credit-card limits for some clients, boosting third-quarter revenue and profit. Sigma Lithium Corp. stocks rose as investors focused on the company’s forecast to resume mining operations by the end of the month, despite another quarter of cash burn, lower sales and production volumes. Allianz SE, the German insurer that owns bond manager Pacific Investment Management Co., raised its outlook for full-year profit after third-quarter earnings rose, driven by its property-casualty insurance and asset management businesses. Siemens Energy AG substantially raised its mid-term financial targets on strong demand for gas turbines and data center equipment as well as restructuring progress at its Gamesa wind turbine unit. Richemont sales climbed as shoppers from the US to China snapped up the luxury group’s pricey Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry. Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Plc swung to a £559 million ($735 million) quarterly loss and slashed its guidance after a cyberattack temporarily halted production at the UK’s largest automaker. Japan’s biggest banks raised their annual earnings targets to fresh records and announced plans to buy back shares, as trade fears subside and rising interest rates boost lending profitability. Some of the main moves in markets:
Stocks
The S&P 500 rose 0.3% as of 1 p.m. New York time The Nasdaq 100 rose 0.4% The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.4% The MSCI World Index was little changed Bloomberg Magnificent 7 Total Return Index rose 0.5% The Russell 2000 Index rose 0.5% Currencies
The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed The euro fell 0.2% to $1.1614 The British pound fell 0.3% to $1.3157 The Japanese yen was little changed at 154.64 per dollar Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin fell 2.9% to $95,893.01 Ether was little changed at $3,180.38 Bonds
The yield on 10-year Treasuries advanced two basis points to 4.14% Germany’s 10-year yield advanced three basis points to 2.72% Britain’s 10-year yield advanced 14 basis points to 4.57% The yield on 2-year Treasuries advanced one basis point to 3.60% The yield on 30-year Treasuries advanced three basis points to 4.74% Commodities
United States Methanol Industry Business Report 2025: PESTEL Analysis, Producers, Foreign Trade, Major Wholesalers and Trading Companies, Downstream Markets – ResearchAndMarkets.com Business Wire
United States Carbonates and Peroxocarbonates Business Research Report 2025: PESTEL Analysis, Producers, Foreign Trade, Major Wholesalers and Trading Companies, Downstream Markets – ResearchAndMarkets.com Business Wire
China Chromium Oxides Industry Business Report 2025: PESTEL Analysis, Producers, Foreign Trade, Major Wholesalers and Trading Companies, Downstream Markets – ResearchAndMarkets.com Business Wire
China Formic Acid Business Report 2025: PESTEL Analysis, Producers, Foreign Trade, Major Wholesalers and Trading Companies, Downstream Markets – ResearchAndMarkets.com Business Wire
China Fluorides, Fluorosilicates Business Report 2025: PESTEL Analysis, Producers, Foreign Trade, Major Wholesalers and Trading Companies, Downstream Markets – ResearchAndMarkets.com Business Wire
(Reuters) -JPMorgan Chase has secured deals that will ensure it receives payments from fintech companies for access to its customer bank account data by third-party apps, CNBC reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter.
The agreements were struck with data aggregators including Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar and Akoya, Drew Pusateri, a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson, told Reuters.
Data aggregators are intermediaries who link banks with fintech firms. They previously accessed customer account data from banks such as JPMorgan without paying for it, enabling fintech apps to offer services like budgeting and payments – an arrangement that drew criticism from lenders concerned about data security and fair compensation.
“The free market worked. After productive conversations with our aggregator and fintech partners, we’ve come to agreements that will make the open banking ecosystem safer and more sustainable – and allow customers to continue reliably and securely accessing their favorite financial products,” Pusateri added.
The deals follow weeks of talks between the largest U.S. bank and the aggregators, with JPMorgan agreeing to a lower fee than initially proposed and fintech intermediaries securing concessions on how data requests are handled, the CNBC report added.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) “open banking” rule, introduced last year under the Biden administration, set standards for data sharing between fintechs and banks, enabling consumers to move personal financial data between providers at no cost.
Banks, facing potential losses, swiftly criticized the rule, arguing it risked consumer data security and overstepped the agency’s authority, while fintech firms welcomed it, saying it would enable secure sharing of consumer data.
The CFPB kicked off a do-over of its “open banking” regulations in August, amid public pressure from fintech firms and crypto entrepreneurs.
The Trump administration had initially sided with a banking industry call to scrap the regulations entirely, claiming they exceeded the agency’s legal powers, before changing tack earlier in the year, citing “recent events in the marketplace.”
(Reporting by Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
Tens of millions of cubic metres of toxic waste and mud were unleashed through communities surrounding the dam
Mining company BHP has been found liable for a 2015 dam collapse in Brazil, known as the country’s worst-ever environmental disaster, by London’s High Court.
The dam collapse killed 19 people, polluted the river and destroyed hundreds of homes.
The civil lawsuit, representing more than 600,000 people including civilians, local governments and businesses, had been valued at up to £36bn ($48bn).
BHP said it would appeal against the ruling and continue to fight the lawsuit and has said many claimants in the London lawsuit had already been paid compensation in Brazil.
The dam in Mariana, southeastern Brazil, was owned by Samarco, a joint venture between the mining giants Vale and BHP.
The claimants’ lawyers argued successfully that the trial should be held in London because BHP headquarters “were in the UK at the time of the dam collapse”.
A separate claim against Samarco’s second parent company, Brazilian mining company Vale, was filed in the Netherlands, with more than 70,000 plaintiffs.
The dam was used to store waste from iron ore mining. When it burst, it unleashed tens of millions of cubic metres of toxic waste and mud. The sludge swept through communities, destroying hundreds of people’s homes and poisoning the river.
Judge Finola O’Farrell said in her High Court ruling that continuing to raise the height of the dam when it was not safe to do so was the “direct and immediate cause” of the dam’s collapse, meaning BHP was liable under Brazilian law.
BHP is expected to appeal the ruling.
President of BHP’s Minerals Americas, Brandon Craig, said in a statement that 240,000 claimants in the London lawsuit “have already been paid compensation in Brazil”.
“We believe this will significantly reduce the size and value of claims in the UK group action,” he added.
The lawsuit has been littered with different clashes between the UK firm representing the claimants, Pogust Goodhead, and BHP.
BHP always denied liability and said the London lawsuit duplicated legal proceedings and reparation and repair programmes in Brazil.
BHP and Vale have set up an organisation called the Renova Foundation tasked with compensating victims. It has offered them either cash compensation, or a house in a new city that the foundation has built to replace the town of Novo Bento and has disbursed billions of dollars in repair and compensation actions to hundreds of thousands of people.
In June, a presentation by BHP and Vale’s Samarco venture said around 130,000 people in Brazil had reached settlements with them. In response, Pogust Goodhead alleged the companies had pressured claimants to “settle their claims at far below their true value” and that it would seek £1.3bn in unpaid fees lost as a result.
It alleged that a $30.3bn compensation agreement which Brazil signed with BHP, Vale and Samarco in October 2024 prevented claimants from discussing the deal with the firm or paying its legal fees.
The firm said it had incurred $1bn in borrowing costs to finance the English case.
BHP said it rejected Pogust Goodhead’s allegations in their entirety and dispute “their factual and legal basis.”
It said the claims were “without merit” and BHP would “vigorously contest them.” A spokesperson also said that the firm continued to believe Brazil was the most appropriate, effective, and efficient place for compensation for the dam collapse.
AFP via Getty Images
Some of those affected by the disaster travelled to the High Court last year
But there were also parallel claims that Pogust Goodhead – which promotes itself as a firm representing human rights and environmental law – had tried to profit off “vulnerable” Brazilians.
During proceedings the firm was accused of “misleading” vulnerable Brazilians for its own gain by a Brazilian judge in the state of Minas Gerais.
Pogust Goodhead rejected the accusation at the time as “without merit”.
In a claim brought by the Public Prosecutors and Public Defenders in Brazil against Pogust Goodhead, the judge criticised several “allegedly abusive clauses” in Pogust Goodhead’s contracts with Brazilians who suffered damage.
Among these, it alleges the law firm engaged in “misleading advertising” considering the “hypervulnerability of those affected”.
It also alleges “undue charging of fees on compensation amounts obtained extrajudicially in Brazil” which it said represents “illicit enrichment that diverts essential resources from those affected” and “excessive” penalties for claimants who terminated their contracts which it said “discouraged” them from joining national compensation programmes.
The former Brazilian ambassador in London and Washington, Rubens Barbosa, told the BBC earlier this year that he believed this amounted to spreading misleading information in Brazil.
Mr Barbosa said bringing the case to London “hinders efforts to resolve the matter locally” and the “extremely vulnerable Brazilians were misled” by contracts.
A leading artificial intelligence company claims to have stopped a China-backed “cyber espionage” campaign that was able to infiltrate financial firms and government agencies with almost no human oversight.
The US-based Anthropic said its coding tool, Claude Code, was “manipulated” by a Chinese state-sponsored group to attack 30 entities around the world in September, achieving a “handful of successful intrusions”.
This was a “significant escalation” from previous AI-enabled attacks it monitored, it wrote in a blogpost on Thursday, because Claude acted largely independently: 80 to 90% of the operations involved in the attack were performed without a human in the loop.
“The actor achieved what we believe is the first documented case of a cyber-attack largely executed without human intervention at scale,” it wrote.
Anthropic did not clarify which financial institutions and government agencies had been targeted, or what exactly the hackers had achieved – although it did say they were able to access their targets’ internal data.
It said Claude had made numerous mistakes in executing the attacks, at times making up facts about its targets, or claiming to have “discovered” information that was free to access.
Policymakers and some experts said the findings were an unsettling sign of how capable certain AI systems have grown: tools such as Claude are now able to work independently over longer periods of time.
“Wake the f up. This is going to destroy us – sooner than we think – if we don’t make AI regulation a national priority tomorrow,” the US senator Chris Murphy wrote on X in response to the findings.
“AI systems can now perform tasks that previously required skilled human operators,” said Fred Heiding, a computing security researcher at Harvard University. “It’s getting so easy for attackers to cause real damage. The AI companies don’t take enough responsibility.”
Other cybersecurity experts were more sceptical, pointing to inflated claims about AI-fuelled cyber-attacks in recent years – such as an AI-powered “password cracker” from 2023 that performed no better than conventional methods – and suggesting Anthropic was trying to create hype around AI.
“To me, Anthropic is describing fancy automation, nothing else,” said Michal Wozniak, an independent cybersecurity expert. “Code generation is involved, but that’s not ‘intelligence’, that’s just spicy copy-paste.”
Wozniak said Anthropic’s release was a distraction from a bigger cybersecurity concern: businesses and governments integrating “complex, poorly understood” AI tools into their operations without understanding them, exposing them to vulnerabilities. The real threat, he said, were cybercriminals themselves – and lax cybersecurity practices.
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Anthropic, like all leading AI companies, has guardrails that are supposed to stop its models from assisting in cyber-attacks – or promoting harm generally. However, it said, the hackers were able to subvert these guardrails by telling Claude to role-play being an “employee of a legitimate cybersecurity firm” conducting tests.
Wozniak said: “Anthropic’s valuation is at around $180bn, and they still can’t figure out how not to have their tools subverted by a tactic a 13-year-old uses when they want to prank-call someone.”
Marius Hobbhahn, the founder of Apollo Research, a company that evaluates AI models for safety, said the attacks were a sign of what could come as capabilities grow.
“I think society is not well prepared for this kind of rapidly changing landscape in terms of AI and cyber capabilities. I would expect many more similar events to happen in the coming years, plausibly with larger consequences.”
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The Chinese government has expressed “extreme disappointment” with the Dutch minister at the heart of a row over chip supply to the car industry.
A spokesperson for the ministry of commerce was responding to an interview by Vincent Karremans on Thursday in which he described the standoff between China and the European Union as a “wake-up call” for western leaders.
The spokesperson said: “China has noted the recent remarks made by Dutch minister of economic affairs Karremans in media interviews. China expresses extreme disappointment and strong dissatisfaction with such remarks that confuse right and wrong, distort facts and persist in a single-minded course.
“The profound lesson this semiconductor supply chain crisis has taught the world is that administrative measures should not be used to improperly interfere with corporate operations.”
Beijing imposed a worldwide ban on exports of chips from Nexperia at the beginning of the October, almost bringing the global car industry to a halt.
Its drastic action followed a decision by the Dutch government to take supervisory control of the Chinese-owned company at the end of September citing economic security issues.
In the interview Karremans said the Dutch government had received intelligence that the Chinese CEO was “moving away intellectual property rights, they were firing people and they were looking to relocate production to China” from its subsidiary factory in Hamburg.
Nexperia is a subsidiary of Wingtech Technology, a Shanghai-listed company, which bought the Dutch chip maker in 2018.
Karremans said he had no regrets about the steps his government took, saying on the basis of the information he had now, he would do it all over again.
But his actions have infuriated China, which instead of entering a bilateral battle on behalf of Wingtech, ordered a global ban on exports of Nexperia chips which are all finished in China.
The spokesperson for the Chinese ministry described a court decision to suspend the Chinese boss of Nexperia as “erroneous” and blamed the export ban directly on the Dutch.
“This unwise and impulsive act, which violates the spirit of contract, is the root cause of the turmoil and chaos in the global semiconductor supply chain,” it said.
A delegation from the Netherlands is travelling to Beijing next week in an effort to find a long-term resolution to the row, with Karremans expected to travel there next month on a pre-scheduled trade trip.
