Rise and Shine: Everything you need to know before the ASX opens

Good morning everyone and welcome to Rise and Shine on Monday, November 3, 2025. Here’s what you should know before the ASX opens today…

At 7 am AEST Monday, ASX futures were down about 0.1%, hinting at a soft start to the week

Here’s what happened on Friday…

Wall Street wraps a record streak

Last Friday, the Dow inched up 0.09%, the S&P 500 added 0.26%, and the Nasdaq climbed 0.61%.

On paper, that’s barely a pulse, but zoom out and you’ll see that Wall Street has just closed its seventh straight winning month.

Amazon was the week’s rock star, jumping 7.5% to an all-time high after smashing earnings expectations. Its cloud arm, AWS, grew 20%, proving that enterprise spending on AI and cloud isn’t cooling just yet.

Apple joined the party with stronger-than-expected results and another record high, before giving some back when traders remembered that iPhone demand doesn’t grow to the sky.

Nvidia spent Friday announcing fresh deals in South Korea, up to 260,000 AI chips, while quietly accepting that China’s business is now basically a ghost town.

Still, the company’s market cap hovers around US$5 trillion, which is roughly the same as Japan’s annual GDP, if you need perspective.

And in Omaha, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on a record US$382 billion cash pile, earning short-term interest and waiting for blood in the streets.

AI  hits the ‘prove it’ phase

Last week’s Big Tech earnings came with a reality check: AI spending isn’t an automatic win anymore.

For the past year, you could drop “AI” into a quarterly update and your stock would rally before the CFO finished the slide deck.

But the market’s now tired of promises, it wants results.

Meta found that out the hard way. Mark Zuckerberg hyped up AI advances, engagement metrics, and his grand “metaverse 2.0” narrative  – then watched his stock tumble 11%, its biggest single-day drop in three years.

“We’re starting to see, in some cases, a discipline check that investors are putting on companies,” Charles Schwab’s Kevin Gordon told Bloomberg.

Some experts believe we have shifted from ‘build it and they will come’ to ‘build it only if they’ve already signed the contract’ phase.

World Bank: commodity boom’s on borrowed time

While Big Tech throws cash at data centres, the World Bank just tapped the brakes on the old-school stuff – oil, metals, and food.

Its latest outlook points to global commodity prices falling to their lowest in six years by 2026.

Oil prices are expected to slip toward US$60 a barrel, food prices are easing, and metals are losing their shine.

Blame a mix of China’s slowing demand, EVs eating into fuel use, and too much supply sloshing around the system.

That might sound like good news for inflation, and it is, for now.

But chief economist Indermit Gill warned that “this respite will not last.”

The one part of the market ignoring gravity? Precious metals.

Gold is up 42% this year and silver 34%, as central banks and nervous investors hoard safe-haven assets.

In other words, money’s leaving the oil rigs and piling into vaults.

RBA week

And down here, it’s RBA week again, the monthly ritual when every economist pretends they know what Michele Bullock will do next.

Consensus says the RBA will hold on Tuesday.

But cracks are spreading: retail’s soft, housing’s flattening, and unemployment’s creeping higher.

A surprise cut isn’t impossible, just improbable, experts agreed.

Commodity/forex/crypto market prices

What got you talking

Also in the news…

Investors are piling back into critical minerals as Lynas, MinRes and IGO show signs the sector’s shaking off its lithium hangover.

JPMorgan’s flipped bullish on lithium, tipping energy storage to spark a fresh deficit and push prices higher through 2027.

The Fed Reserve’s rate cut and quantitative tightening halt show it’s out of moves and staring down stagflation.

Guy on Rocks is eyeing uranium again, backing Aura Energy as the Mauritanian miner rides a rising spot price and growing momentum across the sector.

Trading halts

Battery Age Minerals (ASX:BM8) – cap raise
McLaren Minerals (ASX:MML) – cap raise
Volt Resources (ASX:VRC) – pending announcement

At Stockhead we tell it like it is. While Energy Transition Minerals is a Stockhead advertiser, it did not sponsor this article.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.