📈Juicy: The Enhanced Games, nicknamed the “Steroid Olympics”, plans to go public through a SPAC merger valuing the group at about $1.2 Bn. Backed by Peter Thiel (Palantir) and Donald Trump Jr, the concept openly encourages the use of performance-enhancing drugs to break world records.

📈It Doesn’t Impress Me: CrowdStrike $CRWD ( ▼ 2.49% ) and Okta $OKTA ( ▼ 0.45% ) both delivered solid earnings and beat expectations, yet each still saw their stock drop by 5%. The reaction says a lot about where investor sentiment sits; with Nvidia blowing investors away, slow and steady growth just ain’t that impressive anymore

📈Yields to hit 2%? Japan’s 10-year government bond yield has climbed to a 17-year high of 1.95%. Since ending its yield-curve control policy (where the 10-year yield was capped at 1%) the Bank of Japan has been raising rates, pushing up borrowing costs. This shift complicates the carry trade and makes that record stimulus package a lot more expensive to fund.

📈Jobs (report) Dropped: The private sector equivalent of the official jobs report dropped and the US economy lost about 32,000 private-sector jobs last month. It’s not looking so hot and this is the clearest read the Fed will get before its December 9/10 meeting. Financial markets have priced in a 85% chance of a 25bps cut but we’ll have to wait and see what J Pow does.

🌎Gen Beta’s First Paycheck: Following the Big Beautiful Bill, the U.S. government formalized the plan to establish $1,000 investment accounts for every child born in 2025. To bridge the gap for slightly older children who missed out, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has announced a $6.25B donation allowing the creation of similar accounts for children born from 2023 through to the end of 2024.

🌎Singapore’s Deadly Year: Despite a global shift away from capital punishment, Singapore has carried out more executions this year than at any point since 2003. At least 17 people have been hanged for drug trafficking and murder. With international peers expressing their disapproval the Government is holding firm that it makes Singapore a safer, drug-free country.

🌎5 Years and 5 Bombs Later…: After five years of investigation, the FBI has arrested a suspect accused of planting not one, but five (!) pipe bombs near Democratic and Republican offices during the 2021 Capitol riot. Investigators had little more than a blurry CCTV image to go on, making the identification and arrest a long-running challenge.

🌎No Chill in the Pacific: With tensions rising between Japan and China, Taiwan’s president warned it could take up to a year for relations between the two major powers to cool off. Meanwhile, Taiwan has banned Chinese social app Xiaohongshu (RedNote) after linking it to 1,700 fraud cases and saying it failed all cybersecurity checks.

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👔So Much for the Metaverse: Zuckerberg once bet the farm on the Metaverse. Now, $70 Bn in the red, he’s folding his hand. Meta is reportedly slashing budgets for its VR and Horizon Worlds teams by up to 30%. Markets reacted with a 4% stock jump showing that investors are clearly ready to move on.

👔The Race for ROI: Sam Altman is hitting the brakes on other OpenAI intitatives to defend home turf. In a Monday internal memo, he declared a “code red” to prioritize the improvement of ChatGPT as competition mounts from Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s Claude. Competition is fierce as the entire industry scrambles to prove to Wall Street they are worth the billions invested in them.

👔Ex-Dancer → Youngest Billionaire: Former professional ballerina and MIT graduate Luana Lopes Lara is now the youngest self-made female billionaire, surpassing Lucy Guo (31) and Taylor Swift (33). This milestone follows a massive valuation spike for her company, Kalshi, which grew more than 5x in under six months, now sitting at approximately $11 billion.

👔Locked-in Martin: Lockheed Martin announced the opening of a new hypersonic system integration lab at its Huntsville campus. Hypersonic weapons are key to the current arms race between the US and China because they travel over five times the speed of sound, allowing them to evade traditional missile defenses.

🤪Triggered: The Oxford University Press has crowned “rage bait” as its word or phrase of the year after its usage tripled over the last 12 months. For the uninitiated: 'Ragebaiting' is the tactic of using provocative headlines, misinformation, or offensive statements to deliberately anger readers online, thereby boosting engagement and driving traffic.

🤪Racoon Gets Wasted, Passes Out By Toilet: A U.S. liquor store found an unexpected, intoxicated patron in their bathroom: a raccoon that had passed out between a toilet and a bin. An officer reported the animal fell through a ceiling tile before going "on a full-blown rampage, drinking everything" from the bottom shelf.

🤪Lego Trump: The White House has unveiled its 2025 Christmas decorations, themed "Home Is Where the Heart Is." The lavish display features a LEGO portrait of President Trump, 51 Christmas trees, 10,000 decorative butterflies, 25,000 feet of ribbon, and 120 pounds of gingerbread.

🤪Marvel is Dead. Long Live the Bunny: Disney's Zootopia 2 has become the highest-grossing foreign animated film in China, earning ~2 billion yuan in its first week. The sequel is a notable exception to the recent trend of declining interest in overseas productions, even beating Avengers: Endgame for the highest single-day earnings ever for an imported film.