Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - A 30th stock-market record

A rally in several large technology companies drove stocks to all-time highs, with some prominent Wall Street strategists rushing to boost their targets even as many hedge funds grow increasingly cautious. The S&P 500 hit its 30th record this year, defying concerns about narrow breadth that could make the market more vulnerable to surprises. As traders geared up for retail-sales data and a slew of Federal Reserve speakers, Treasuries fell amid a flurry of high-grade corporate bond sales that exceeded $21 billion, led by Home Depot. That’s ahead of Wednesday’s holiday. Here’s your markets wrap. —Natasha Solo-Lyons 

In the face of calls around the world to diversify out of the dollar in recent years, the US has nabbed almost one-third of all the investment that flowed across borders since Covid struck. An International Monetary Fund analysis sent by request to Bloomberg News shows that the share of global flows has climbed — not fallen — since a shortage of dollars in 2020 spooked global investors and the 2022 freezing of Russian assets stoked questions about respect for free movement of capital. The pre-pandemic US average share was just 18%, according to the IMF.

Regional finance hubs Hong Kong and Singapore have topped a new global list of the world’s most expensive cities for expatriates, keeping Swiss destinations from the top spots for the second year in a row. High rental costs saw the rival cities beat Zurich, Geneva, Basel and Bern to the top of the table, according to Mercer’s 2024 Cost of Living report. Read the full list of the world’s top 30 most-expensive cities for expats here. 

Bill Gates said he’s prepared to plow billions of dollars into a next-generation nuclear power plant project in Wyoming to meet growing US electricity needs. TerraPower, a startup founded by Gates, broke ground for construction of its first commercial reactor last week in Wyoming, where a coal plant is shutting down, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft said on CBS’s Face the Nation. TerraPower has explored simpler, cheaper reactors since 2008 and expects to complete the new reactor in 2030. “I put in over a billion, and I’ll put in billions more,” said Gates, the world’s sixth-richest person according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Bill Gates. Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg

Florida’s Palm Beach has lured some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people with its palatial, oceanfront estates home to presidential hopefuls, hedge-fund titans and real-estate tycoons. Now, one of the nation’s richest counties is asking investors for $95 million to make sure teachers, firefighters and garbage men have a place to live there too.

The most powerful weapon that hedge funds have against regulators like Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler is no longer white-shoe lawyers or silver-tongued lobbyists. It’s an address in Texas. The National Association of Private Fund Managers, a little-known group whose main focus appears to be challenging SEC rules, has sat tucked in a Fort Worth law office since its founding in 2022. Its home is 1,500 miles from many hedge fund campuses in leafy Connecticut, and even further from London or Singapore, where its impact is being felt. But the group’s address at 301 Commerce Street in Texas’s fifth-biggest city is serving a greater purpose.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen told investors he’s focused on achieving profitability at the ailing video game retailer and plans to avoid the “hype” that has buffeted the shares to extremes as part of the meme-stock frenzy. “Revenue without profits and prospects of future cash flow are of no value to shareholders,” Cohen said in brief remarks at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Monday, after it had been postponed following technical difficulties last week. “This means a smaller network of stores with an expanded assortment of higher-value items that fit into our trade-in model.”

From faulty ovens to missing engine parts to malfunctioning seat dividers, Air France is bearing the brunt of the still restrictive supply-chain bottlenecks — and CEO Ben Smith says it’s costing the airline. “We’ve got airplanes that are missing parts, cabins that are missing parts, engines — missing parts,” Smith said in Paris at a company event. “So either these airplanes have to be grounded or we have to spend more money on overhauling or redoing the parts ourselves. So that’s very frustrating.”

• Macron’s struggles have Europe fretting over defense and Ukraine.
• Boeing CEO faces Senate grilling as successor search gains pace.
• Hackers demand as much as $5 million from Snowflake clients.
• Google DeepMind shifts from research lab to AI product factory.
• Bloomberg Opinion: Applying for a job shouldn’t be humiliating.
• Trump’s planned tariffs would tax US households, economists warn.
• Adidas opens fraud probe in China after whistleblower letter.

Is it worth dropping anywhere from $250 to as much as $1,000 just to get into a New York City restaurant? The 30,000 people who have flocked to a service called Appointment Trader to buy reservations at some of the city’s hottest dining spots seemingly think so. Now, that practice is coming under threat from New York’s proposed Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act. But the proposed law aimed at bots and scalpers who cater to rich and desperate restaurant fans isn't guaranteed to make getting a hot table easier.

Cote Photographer: Gary He

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