For Gary Liu, the most profound shift in commerce today is not about faster checkouts or new wallets. It is about who, or what, sits between merchants and consumers. “There’s only one thing that’s fair to everyone - you only have 24 hours a day,” says Liu, CEO of Antom and Senior Vice President of Ant International. “Whichever service occupies the most consumer time, that’s where commerce should b...
For Gary Liu, the most profound shift in commerce today is not about faster checkouts or new wallets. It is about who, or what, sits between merchants and consumers. “There’s only one thing that’s fair to everyone - you only have 24 hours a day,” says Liu, CEO of Antom and Senior Vice President of Ant International. “Whichever service occupies the most consumer time, that’s where commerce should be.” Increasingly, that time is being spent not browsing websites, but interacting with AI...
RoboSense CEO Mark Qiu talks about the key takeaways of their first-ever profitable quarter since 2014. He explains how the shift from analog to digital LiDAR will lift the company's performance and is a great cost advantage (Source: Bloomberg)
RoboSense CEO Mark Qiu talks about the key takeaways of their first-ever profitable quarter since 2014. He explains how the shift from analog to digital LiDAR will lift the company's performance and is a great cost advantage (Source: Bloomberg)
A looming MSCI Inc. decision over Indonesia’s market status is highlighting the challenge regulators face to address opaque ownership structures and poor disclosures by the nation’s biggest companies. Regulators are fast-tracking reforms, including more transparency on affiliated shareholders, as part of a broader effort to make Indonesia more attractive to global investors. The changes are also m...
A looming MSCI Inc. decision over Indonesia’s market status is highlighting the challenge regulators face to address opaque ownership structures and poor disclosures by the nation’s biggest companies. Regulators are fast-tracking reforms, including more transparency on affiliated shareholders, as part of a broader effort to make Indonesia more attractive to global investors. The changes are also meant to placate MSCI, which in January warned of a possible downgrade from emerging market status. The task has exposed a deeper dilemma in Indonesia: regulators are trying to identify ultimate ownership and stakes in a system where tycoons routinely hide behind a web of related parties and affiliates to avoid scrutiny. The clash is pitting understaffed regulators with a patchy track record against powerful elites who have used that system to dominate large parts of Southeast Asia’s largest economy. Whether regulators succeed in dismantling that framework will determine the value of Indonesian assets in global portfolios for years to come. The biggest risk, investors say, is executing the reforms. Papering over problems or overdoing it may lead to a downward spiral in confidence and financial assets. “It would be difficult for the Indonesian government to enact all the changes in time, to convince the inside holders of these families to give up shares and you gotta convince someone to buy the shares,” said Warren Chiang , a portfolio manager at Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo & Co. While the changes are likely positive in the long term, the road ahead “would be relatively painful,” he added. The measures date back to earlier this year when MSCI shocked the market by flagging concerns over investability, particularly the limited number of shares available for trading known as free float. The news sent markets reeling, and regulators quickly pledged to double minimum float levels to 15% as well as mandate greater disclosures ahead of MSCI’s May decision. Final regulations are set ...
China’s long-awaited shift toward reflation may finally be near, raising hopes it can revive corporate earnings and spur gains in stocks. Rising commodity prices due to the Iran war are expected to bolster profit across sectors from energy and materials to mining equipment and power infrastructure. At the same time, a pickup in inflation might help companies regain pricing power after years of cut...
China’s long-awaited shift toward reflation may finally be near, raising hopes it can revive corporate earnings and spur gains in stocks. Rising commodity prices due to the Iran war are expected to bolster profit across sectors from energy and materials to mining equipment and power infrastructure. At the same time, a pickup in inflation might help companies regain pricing power after years of cutthroat competition. A key question is whether companies and consumers will pivot from a deflationary mindset — where prices keep falling — to confidence about a return to growth. While investors still want to see a broader recovery across sectors before calling a bottom, stabilizing factory-gate prices and Beijing’s so-called anti-involution campaign to curb excessive competition suggest inflation could be a boon rather than the threat it poses to the rest of the world. “Our allocation is still in favor of China,” said Qian Su , head of investment management for Asia at Indosuez Wealth Management, adding that beyond energy, financials such as banks and insurers, may also benefit. “It’s the opposite of the whole world where everything is already inflationary.” Gains in energy-intensive sectors and commodity producers have pushed the energy sub-index up 8.4% since the Iran war began on Feb. 28, outperforming the benchmark CSI 300 Index , which has dropped 5% over the period. Higher commodity costs are also starting to feed through to producer prices , which may bring an end to the deflationary stretch that has persisted since October 2022. Even a small pickup in inflation would give companies more room to raise prices, after years of cutting or keeping them low to stay competitive. Several Chinese chemical producers have already raised selling prices to offset higher raw material costs, with their shares rallying as investors see improving margins and near-term earnings visibility. “Rising oil prices, along with the ongoing anti-involution campaign, will help push China’s PPI...
Although artificial intelligence (AI) technology itself isn't new, the popularity of AI apps and tools has thrown it fully into the mainstream. And in true big tech fashion, where there's an increase in eyeballs, there's an increase in their spending. Over the past few years, major hyperscalers -- companies like Microsoft , Amazon , and Alphabet that power a lot of the digital world -- have spent ...
Although artificial intelligence (AI) technology itself isn't new, the popularity of AI apps and tools has thrown it fully into the mainstream. And in true big tech fashion, where there's an increase in eyeballs, there's an increase in their spending. Over the past few years, major hyperscalers -- companies like Microsoft , Amazon , and Alphabet that power a lot of the digital world -- have spent billions building out their AI infrastructure. It seems these checks are only going to get bigger, too. Major tech companies are expected to spend around $700 billion on their AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. However, as hundreds of billions are being spent, the safest bet isn't the company with the best chatbot or productivity tools. It's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM) , also known as TSMC. Continue reading
Processing 200,000 tokens through a large language model is expensive and slow: the longer the context, the faster the costs spiral. Researchers at Tsinghua University and Z.ai have built a technique called IndexCache that cuts up to 75% of the redundant computation in sparse attention models, delivering up to 1.82x faster time-to-first-token and 1.48x faster generation throughput at that context ...
Processing 200,000 tokens through a large language model is expensive and slow: the longer the context, the faster the costs spiral. Researchers at Tsinghua University and Z.ai have built a technique called IndexCache that cuts up to 75% of the redundant computation in sparse attention models, delivering up to 1.82x faster time-to-first-token and 1.48x faster generation throughput at that context length. The technique applies to models using the DeepSeek Sparse Attention architecture, including the latest DeepSeek and GLM families. It can help enterprises provide faster user experiences for production-scale, long-context models, a capability already proven in preliminary tests on the 744-billion-parameter GLM-5 model. The DSA bottleneck Large language models rely on the self-attention mechanism, a process where the model computes the relationship between every token in its context and all the preceding ones to predict the next token. However, self-attention has a severe limitation. Its computational complexity scales quadratically with sequence length. For applications requiring extended context windows (e.g., large document processing, multi-step agentic workflows, or long chain-of-thought reasoning), this quadratic scaling leads to sluggish inference speeds and significant compute and memory costs. Sparse attention offers a principled solution to this scaling problem. Instead of calculating the relationship between every token and all preceding ones, sparse attention optimizes the process by having each query select and attend to only the most relevant subset of tokens. DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) is a highly efficient implementation of this concept, first introduced in DeepSeek-V3.2 . To determine which tokens matter most, DSA introduces a lightweight "lightning indexer module" at every layer of the model. This indexer scores all preceding tokens and selects a small batch for the main core attention mechanism to process. By doing this, DSA slashes the heavy c...
The dollar is on track for its best month since July as the conflict in the Middle East scrambles Wall Street’s playbook for the world’s dominant reserve currency. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index is up more than 2% in March, buoyed by haven flows and diminished expectations for Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts after the war caused energy prices to soar. It marks a sharp reversal for the greenbac...
The dollar is on track for its best month since July as the conflict in the Middle East scrambles Wall Street’s playbook for the world’s dominant reserve currency. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index is up more than 2% in March, buoyed by haven flows and diminished expectations for Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts after the war caused energy prices to soar. It marks a sharp reversal for the greenback, which on the eve of the conflict had just logged its fourth straight losing month. As the hostilities drag on, it’s ramping up pressure on banks and investors who’ve had a dim view of the currency’s prospects. JPMorgan Chase & Co. strategists, for example, turned bullish for the first time in a year. In the futures market, speculators flipped to betting on greenback gains, whereas in mid-February they were the most bearish in about five years . “The short dollar positions of early 2026 were caught offsides,” said Steven Englander , head of G-10 foreign-exchange research at Standard Chartered Bank. With traders dumping short bets and energy prices elevated, Englander is sticking to his forecast for further dollar gains, which he held coming into 2026. He sees it reaching about $1.12 per euro by year-end, its strongest since May, from around $1.15 now. Gloomy Start Firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG came into the year forecasting losses for the US currency, based in part on the projection that the Fed would keep easing in 2026. The Bloomberg dollar gauge sank roughly 8% in 2025, the most since 2017. Three Fed rate cuts last year eroded demand, but so did President Donald Trump ’s trade war, which sparked speculation around a possible flight from US assets. As it turned out, investors kept piling in, while hedging the threat of dollar declines. One overarching risk is that the war reignites talk of a potential long-term move away from US markets and the dollar — whether out of concern around the administration’s policies or heightened angst over t...
SlavkoSereda/iStock via Getty Images U.S. crude oil futures turned lower after President Trump said late Thursday he was extending a pause in attacking Iran's energy facilities by another 10 days, to April 6. "As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction," Trump said in a Truth Social post. "Talks are ongoi...
SlavkoSereda/iStock via Getty Images U.S. crude oil futures turned lower after President Trump said late Thursday he was extending a pause in attacking Iran's energy facilities by another 10 days, to April 6. "As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction," Trump said in a Truth Social post. "Talks are ongoing and, despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the Fake News Media, and others, they are going very well." Crude oil jumped in regular trading Thursday as the market maintained doubts about the success of U.S. efforts to negotiate an end to the conflict with Iran. The president's extension of his pause followed renewed threats to strike Iran if the country failed to "get serious" about talks "before it is too late," while reports indicate the U.S. is moving more troops to the region and Israel said it had killed the Iran Revolutionary Guard's naval commander. "A chasm still exists between Trump's comments that major progress is being seen in negotiations and that the war has been won, and Iran's indicated refusal to accept U.S. demands," Ritterbusch & Associates said in a note. Although some safe passage has been offered to a few cargoes through the Strait of Hormuz and the Saudis have stepped up exports through the Red Sea port of Yanbu, "this incremental supply remains modest compared to the disrupted cargo flow through the strait." Largely crowded out of news reporting is the impact of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil shipping; Reuters calculations based on market data show at least 40% of Russia's oil export capacity has been halted . Front-month Nymex crude ( CL1:COM ) for May delivery gained 4.6% in regular trading Thursday to $94.48/bbl but has turned ~1% lower after-hours, while front-month Brent crude for May delivery ( CO1:COM ) climbed 5.6% to $108.01/bbl, its third-highest settlement value this year. U.S. natural gas futures ( NG1:COM ) settled hi...
President Donald Trump said 11 minutes after the market closed that the U.S. would hold off on striking Iranian energy plants until Monday, April 6, at 8 p.m. ET. Worries that the war would escalate—as the original Friday deadline loomed—sent Brent crude oil futures 5.7% higher to $108.01 a barrel on Thursday. Oil prices later pulled back on Trump’s announcement.
President Donald Trump said 11 minutes after the market closed that the U.S. would hold off on striking Iranian energy plants until Monday, April 6, at 8 p.m. ET. Worries that the war would escalate—as the original Friday deadline loomed—sent Brent crude oil futures 5.7% higher to $108.01 a barrel on Thursday. Oil prices later pulled back on Trump’s announcement.
President Donald Trump said he would sign an order to pay Transportation Security Administration officers in a bid to alleviate disruptions at US airports with lawmakers in Congress deadlocked on how to end a partial government shutdown. “I am going to sign an Order instructing the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullen, to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergenc...
President Donald Trump said he would sign an order to pay Transportation Security Administration officers in a bid to alleviate disruptions at US airports with lawmakers in Congress deadlocked on how to end a partial government shutdown. “I am going to sign an Order instructing the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullen, to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports,” Trump declared in a social...