The new route gives Brits the chance to visit two Christmas markets this historic city which run from November to January and boast free entry, featuring classic winter scenes of chalets, Christmas trees, and an open-air ice rink
The first flight comes after Ryanair unveiled its newly expanded winter schedule last month, with 22 new routes from UK airports(Image: Peter Byrne/PA Wire)
Ryanair has announced a brand new route in time for cheap getaways this winter and this Christmas.
The budget airline has revealed its new winter 2026 route from Manchester to Warsaw Modlin in Poland. Ryanair bosses shared yesterday (October 27) how the first of the Manchester-Warsaw Modlin flights took of this week.
Ryanair says it will operate six weekly flights on this “exciting new winter 2026 route, providing UK customers with even more choice at Europe’s lowest fares”. Ryanair’s full winter 2026 schedule is available to book now via the Ryanair app and website in time for cheap winter and Christmas breaks.
The new route gives Brits the chance to enjoy Warsaw’s two Christmas markets, including the huge Jarmark Warszawski at Plac Defilad, by the Palace of Culture and Science, and the traditional, historic market in the Old Town along the city walls.
Both markets run from November to January and boast free entry, featuring classic winter scenes of chalets, Christmas trees, and an open-air ice rink.
The first flight comes after Ryanair unveiled its newly expanded winter schedule last month, with 22 new routes from UK airports with Birmingham, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and London airports benefiting the most. Ryanair also announced that it was adding nineteenth-based aircraft at Manchester Airport this winter, helping it to run one extra route from the North West hub.
Ryanair is increasing its flight frequencies on another 26 routes from Manchester, including holiday hotspots like Malaga, Palma de Mallorca and Madrid, as well as city break destinations like Barcelona, Belfast, Venice, Porto, Prague and Krakow.
Eye-catching flights among the list included the new winter sunshine route from Birmingham to Marrakech, which regularly enjoys mild winter temperatures. The bulk of the other routes are to northern and western European destinations where more festive pleasures are on the itinerary.
The new route announcement followed the boss of Ryanair warning that air fares would “no doubt” rise next year for summer holidaymakers amid the surging price of oil and the Iran war.
Earlier this month, oil prices rose above 100 dollars a barrel for the first time since July after the latest round of strikes in the conflict.
Ryanair’s Director of Communications, Jade Kirwan, said: “ It was great to see the first flight of our new winter 2026 route from Manchester to Warsaw Modlin take off this week, bringing the first of many happy Ryanair passengers on their winter 2026 getaways.
“Our Manchester to Warsaw Modlin route will operate six times per week, offering our UK customers even more choice at the lowest fares in Europe. Ryanair’s full winter 2026 schedule is available to book now on the Ryanair app/website.”
Global stock markets have climbed as investors continue to bet on bright prospects for the tech giants driving the AI boom.
In the United States, all three major stock indexes rose on Tuesday, led by the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, which gained 1.18 percent.
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The benchmark S&P 500 rose 0.6 percent, while the narrower Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up 0.03 percent.
Five of the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks rose, led by Tesla, up 4.04 percent.
Amazon gained 1.61 percent, while Apple and Alphabet gained 0.93 percent and 0.9 percent, respectively.
Nvidia, the world’s most valuable public company, rose almost 1 percent after announcing a $3bn investment in Meta’s equity offering.
Meta fell 1.64 percent, while Microsoft fell 0.24 percent.
Other big movers in tech included Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom and Intel, which gained 5.45 percent, 4 percent and 3.61 percent, respectively.
Asia Pacific markets rally
Gains continued in the Asia Pacific on Wednesday, with stock markets in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia climbing.
The KOSPI in Seoul led the gains, with the benchmark index up 5.84 percent as of 03:00 GMT.
The surge came as South Korea’s SK Hynix, one of the world’s top three memory chip makers, announced blockbuster third-quarter results on Wednesday, with operating profit soaring about 630 percent year-on-year to 83.33 trillion won ($62.8bn).
SK Hynix shares listed in South Korea surged more than 8 percent following the results.
In Tokyo, the benchmark Nikkei 225 was up 1.26 percent, while the TAIEX in Taipei was up 1.32 percent.
The S&P/ASX 200 in Sydney was up 0.11 percent.
Investors are keenly anticipating upcoming earnings reports from major tech players as they try to gauge whether their massive investments in AI will pay dividends.
Microsoft and Alphabet report their latest results on Wednesday, followed by Amazon on Thursday and Apple on Monday.
On Monday, AI giant Anthropic filed paperwork for its hotly anticipated IPO, reporting a net loss of $80.7bn in the first half of 2026 on $16.3bn in revenue.
Tech firms have poured hundreds of billions of dollars each into AI infrastructure, fuelling debate over whether a speculative market bubble could be forming similar to the one that preceded the 2000 dot-com crash.
Global AI investment is forecast to hit $2.7 trillion in 2026 and $3.6 trillion in 2027, according to Gartner, a technology insights company.
Oil prices, which have been elevated since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran, rose about 1 percent as Asian markets opened on Wednesday amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, including hostilities between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis.
Futures for Brent crude, the global benchmark, stood at about $115 a barrel, up 59 percent from before the war began.
Investors react to Lula’s election victory with a sharp decline in the Brazilian real and concerns over increased spending and fiscal challenges.
Published On 26 Oct 202626 Oct 2026
Brazil’s real dropped against the United States dollar on the heels of Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s unexpected re-election after right-wing Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, led in the first round of voting earlier this month.
Brazil’s currency dropped against the dollar by 12 percent in spot trading. Bovespa stock index futures tumbled nearly 15 percent on Monday.
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“I’m not surprised the real is sinking sharply; traders are covering their bets that assume a Bolsonaro victory and tighter fiscal policy,” Rachel Ziemba, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Al Jazeera.
Brazil’s stock exchange halted trading for 30 minutes. The Bovespa index fell 10 percent from its previous close, triggering a circuit-breaker safety mechanism and reversing a rally earlier this month amid expectations of a shift to the right after Bolsonaro won the first round.
Ziemba says Bolsonaro’s refusal to concede the election has driven some financial uncertainty.
“The market pressure is also amplified by the objections raised by Bolsonaro, but the scale of the victory suggests that the result will stand,” she said.
Interest rate futures had also reflected expectations that tighter fiscal policy under Bolsonaro would allow borrowing costs to decline.
“They [investors] assume more domestic spending and higher rates in Brazil. However, the real is still likely to be supported by strong commodity revenues,” Ziemba noted.
Stocks closed on Friday almost 7 percent above their level before the first round, while the Brazilian real was nearly 5 percent stronger against the US dollar.
Interest rate futures are up 3.1 percent, rising sharply after President Lula’s win. Interest rate futures had previously reflected a tighter fiscal policy amid expectations that Bolsonaro would oust the incumbent and that he would allow borrowing costs to decline.
Lula faces an increase in Brazil’s debt and will be challenged with protecting both social programmes and investment, with investors looking for signs of whether his gradual fiscal approach can bring borrowing costs down.
Lula’s team aims to produce a budget surplus of about 1.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. That would leave money to cover part of the interest bill, reducing the need for fresh borrowing. But public debt already exceeds 82 percent of GDP, while pensions and other legally required spending limit where savings can come from.
“Lula’s policies have talked about spending cuts, but he has not gone into the details of how that is going to look,” said Divya Singaravelu, head of research at Meridian 1305 Capital.
Attention will now turn to Lula’s choice of finance minister and what it signals about his fiscal approach.
As Latin America turns to the dollar, development capital tests its reach.
This article appears in the October issue of Global Finance Magazine.
Whether dollarization works has been debated for decades, and in late summer it landed in Venezuela. Steve Hanke, known as the “Money Doctor” for advising governments on dollarization in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, told multiple media outlets that he had been hired as a special adviser to a Venezuelan official to explore dollarizing the bolivar.
If it converted to the dollar, Venezuela would join several Latin American countries that have done so. Panama has used the dollar as legal tender since 1904. Ecuador has used the dollar since 2000; El Salvador converted in 2001. Although Argentina has not dollarized, there is evidence that President Javier Milei has accelerated its de facto shift to the dollar. Less examined is which organizations are investing in dollarization—and whether that capital is doing something dollarization alone can’t.
For CFOs with projects, suppliers, or growth aspirations in dollarized countries—or those moving that way—the balance sheet is the best way to assess the role of development capital. A currency conversion can affect hedging costs, discount rates for capital projects, and the timeline for moving cash. But the money now supporting these transitions or future moves to dollarization, including billions in US development-finance capital, political risk insurance, sovereign debt refinancing, and project loans, carries its own track record worth mulling over before using “dollarized” as shorthand for “de-risked.”
Where Development Capital Lands
The International Development Finance Corp.’s (DFC) Latin American strategy is more than writing large checks. Its CEO Ben Black calls the strategy “economic statecraft”—capital deployed to counter Beijing. “You don’t want to compete against state capitalism with more money from the government,” Black said at a March forum. “You want to create capital structures that bring in private capital.” In Ecuador, where the U.S. dollar is legal tender, the agency’s 2021 framework was linked to a proposed, broader $3.5 billion financing structure. It combined up to $2.8 billion of potential DFC-backed project financing with roughly $700 million from commercial banks, intended to help Ecuador refinance China-related liabilities.
The agency’s completed transactions are more varied. DFC made a $150 million direct loan to expand Ecuador’s Puerto Bolívar port. It also provided political-risk insurance of more than $656 million for the 2023 Galápagos debt conversion and $1 billion for the country’s 2024 Amazon Biocorridor conversion. The latter helped refinance about $1.53 billion of Ecuadorian international bonds. For CFOs looking through a balance sheet lens, Puerto Bolívar is a DFC loan asset. The two larger headline amounts are insurance commitments that could help attract third-party capital.
In Argentina, where dollars are widely used but not the official currency, DFC’s financing is smaller and tied to resource development. The agency approved $4.07 million for early-stage work at Argentina Potash Corp.’s El Ceibo potash project earlier this year. The company expects more dollars to follow. “The US$4.07 million DFC funding is expected to be matched dollar-for-dollar by strategic investors, resulting in total Phase 1 funding of US$8.15 million,” according to a company statement.
Leading Risk vs. Following Money
The Argentina Potash deal points up a divide over where development finance has the most impact: taking risks that private capital won’t or reinforcing markets where private capital is already willing to go. DFC and its defenders argue that the capital leads: the agency takes on risk private investors won’t touch and proves out a sector or structure until commercial capital is comfortable following. Another group argues DFC capital mostly follows. Its development dollars tend to land in the safest, most liquid corners of an economy, such as banks, infrastructure and assets that would likely have attracted private capital anyway.
The harder, riskier investments that dollarization was supposed to encourage still go unfunded. If development capital leads, it’s doing something dollarization alone can’t. It is building the risk tolerance and track record that pulls in private money on its own. If it mostly follows private capital, DFC funding may simply be competing for the safest returns, while the risks that keep money out of harder-to-finance sectors remain.
That’s the view of Byron Villacis Cruz, a University of Oregon sociologist and former head of Ecuador’s national statistics institute, who has studied Ecuador’s dollarization. He said DFC-linked capital has gone toward “traditional banks that … have a lot of liquidity and coverage and stability by itself” rather than higher-risk, higher-need sectors.
“I don’t see investments that are truly analyzing the real opportunities of profit and development in the country,” he said. “That’s kind of like going where the money is versus leading the money.” He also cautions that dollarization solved currency volatility in Ecuador without touching the risks investors cite—regulatory whiplash, contract enforcement and political interference. Foreign investment after 2000 flowed overwhelmingly into oil, he noted, driven by commodity prices, not the new monetary regime.
Casey Halloran has a different view: his tourism and real estate development company, Namu Travel Group in Costa Rica, borrows from the Inter-American Development Bank specifically to relend to small suppliers—boutique hotels and tour operators across the region—that banks often consider too risky to touch. Over the years, Halloran estimates his business has lent about $15 million since first obtaining IDB financing. He’s convinced development capital leads, saying, “Somebody has to go first.”
Weld Royal is a contributing writer based in the U.S.
French yields have been rising for weeks as lawmakers wrangle over a 2027 budget that calls for billions of euros in spending cuts to reduce a debt pile that now stands at around 120% of France’s GDP – one of the highest levels in the eurozone and well above the EU limit of 60%.
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The French Treasury’s OAT bond is also used to set interest rates across a wide swath of the economy, meaning borrowing costs could begin rising for businesses and households.
The last time it was that high was during the dot-com financial crisis.
The spread between the 10-year yield and the German 10-year bond, considered the European benchmark of creditworthiness, also surged to nearly 160 basis points.
The bond selloff puts further pressure on the government ahead of a decision Friday by the ratings agency Moody’s on France’s sovereign credit rating, with most economists expecting a downgrade that would automatically raise the government’s borrowing costs.
Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu is trying to get a 2027 budget approved in parliament despite not having a political majority for the €43 billion ($48bn) in spending cuts he seeks.
Even if approved, the budget would bring France’s deficit down to only 5% of GDP next year, well above the 3% limit for EU members.
Meanwhile, protests over the weekend calling in part for more spending on schools and other public services, degenerated into the worst street violence seen in years.
The bond market (US10Y), (US30Y), (US2Y) has taken control of the current market narrative, creating ripple effects across non-investment-grade technology companies and neo-cloud providers, according to Tyler Radke, Citi’s co-head of U.S. software research.
Formula One has signed a 10-year agreement with Rwanda to bring the sport back to Africa for the first time since 1993. The African Grand Prix will be held on a circuit in Bugesera, near the capital Kigali, from the early 2030s.
Faster settlement is forcing banks and treasurers to rethink liquidity, payments, and custody.
This article appears in the October issue of Global Finance Magazine.
The transition to compressed settlement cycles was initially framed as an operational hurdle. In reality, it exposed a fundamental flaw: markets trade 24/7, while legacy custody and payment rails remain shackled to traditional banking windows.
As settlement windows shrink, treasurers no longer have the luxury of multi-day batch reconciliations. Prefunding trades require real-time liquidity optimization to prevent settlement fails. “We are at an inflection point,” said Lim Soon Chong, group head of Global Transaction Services at DBS Bank Ltd. “Intermediaries are reassessing their strategies to capture the shift toward an ‘on-demand’ digital economy.”
Since 2021, DBS has operationalized this through blockchain-powered token services, enabling real-time multicurrency liquidity and automated treasury actions. By integrating these services with custody and digital exchange services, DBS provides the infrastructure for a programmable, real-time financial ecosystem.
Operational Vanguard: Citi’s Custody+ and SEP
Lim Soon Chong, DBS Bank
Custody transformation is being driven by integrating real-time processing with modular delivery. At the forefront is Citigroup Inc.’s Custody+, a platform designed for an always-on economy.
For Amit Agarwal, head of custody at Citi, the requirement is clear: “To deliver a frictionless, always-on market, cash and securities for fiat and digital assets must settle in real time, 24/7, supported by custody infrastructure that is equally always on.” This vision is operationalized through Citi’s patented Single Event Processing (SEP) technology. Agarwal noted that SEP’s value extends beyond efficiency. By compressing timelines for income events, corporate actions and tax processing, SEP provides clients with earlier liquidity. This transforms faster settlement from a back-office metric into a strategic advantage.
Chris Cox, head of investor services at Citi, added that clients are modernizing legacy models to address cost and regulatory pressures. Cox said the Custody+ ecosystem is the direct answer to these needs. “Customers fundamentally want simplification and improved outcomes,” Cox explained. “Custody+ is our response to addressing those needs—it’s about creating front-office benefits rather than just letting custody be about post-trade. We chose to disrupt our own custody model and bring together our suite of near- and real-time capabilities as a modular ecosystem.”
Yet, technological speed alone is insufficient. Anthony Yeung, chief commercial officer at CoinCover, argues that institutional confidence requires secure key management and transparent recovery. “The regulatory architecture must be matched by institutional-grade safeguards,” Yeung explained. “The real measure of success is whether the ecosystem is built with resilience and operational integrity at its core.”
While Citi’s modular approach serves as a blueprint, this evolution is triggering a cascading effect across the landscape. The move to 24/7 markets is being actively operationalized by major players stripping away the obsolescence of batch-driven infrastructure, fueled by the rise of 24/7 trading, the need for instantaneous collateral fluidity and the proliferation of tokenized real-world assets.
Industrywide Architectural Shifts
Global custodians are redefining the infrastructure layer through digital adoption. BNY has pioneered a unified omnibus architecture that integrates legacy and digital instruments within a single compliance framework. By using distributed ledger technology, BNY enables microsettlements and real-time collateral movement, bypassing standard clearing hours.
Similarly, J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys platform leverages its institutional blockchain arm for intraday liquidity and near-instant delivery-versus-payment, allowing managers to pledge tokenized money market shares as collateral during weekends, neutralizing settlement drag. State Street Bank and Trust Company is bridging the gap between digital asset solutions and legacy accounting via strategic partnerships, replacing traditional reconciliation feeds with streaming APIs. Specialized players like Sygnum and AMINA, meanwhile, further enable atomic cross-currency settlements and smart-contract-based custody.
Buy-Side Adoption & Operational Impact
The buy side is equally driving the push for modernization. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, in partnership with BNY and Securitize, Inc., enables continuous yield and peer-to-peer collateral transfers. Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund uses public ledgers to enable round-the-clock share creation, while Fidelity Digital Assets supports continuous digital clearing. Additionally, UBS Asset Management is piloting automated fund servicing through Project Guardian. These initiatives signal a shift toward programmable financial services.
The infrastructure of 24/7 custody rests on three pillars. First, tokenized liquidity replaces traditional, time-restricted batch messaging windows with programmable cash legs, allowing instantaneous value movement. Second, automated servicing utilizes smart contracts to manage corporate actions, drastically reducing latency. Third, advanced security orchestration, leveraging multiparty computation and hardware security modules, ensures that high-value movements remain secure and verifiable, even outside banking hours. As custodians dismantle legacy constraints, the focus is shifting toward always-on capabilities. The race is no longer about who settles fastest but who builds the most reliable architecture for a global economy that never sleeps.
Navigating the New Custody Paradigm
Moving from traditional, batch-reliant processes to always-on operations transforms custody into a strategic advantage. It allows automated, round-the-clock value movement, continuous yield opportunities, and real-time liquidity management. However, operating in a 24/7 market shifts focus toward new security and regulatory obligations.
Regulatory requirements from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (such as the crypto asset authorization gateway and CRYPTOPRU prudential rules) and U.S. federal stablecoin rulemaking have effectively shifted compliance from a legal filing into an operational and technical security mandate. As a result, custodians and issuers must move away from treating digital asset security as simple smart contract auditing, moving instead toward protecting off-chain infrastructure.
Ultimately, the era of the “siloed vault” is ending. Custody modernization is no longer merely an IT upgrade; it is a fundamental reengineering of the trust model. By embedding institutional-grade wallet infrastructure directly into core banking rails, custodians are shifting from passive gatekeepers to active enablers of the 24/7 digital economy. This evolution is the critical foundation for the next decade of institutional finance, where speed, transparency, and ironclad security are the primary competitive currencies.
Gilly Wright is a contributing writer based in the U.K.
The NFL is urging the Supreme Court to rule on the regulation of prediction markets, arguing in an amicus brief filed Thursday that states — which already regulate legal sports books — are better positioned to oversee sports-related contracts “given the current landscape.”
The NFL is supporting New Jersey’s request for the Supreme Court to rule on the governing authority for prediction markets, which provide an opportunity to trade — or wager — on the result of future events. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has maintained it has exclusive federal jurisdiction, while states have argued that the array of typically yes-or-no questions is akin to gambling and falls under their purview.
“Absent the clarity that only this Court can provide, (prediction market) operators will continue exploiting the gap between state and federal regulation, endangering consumers and the integrity of sports events across the country,” lawyers for the NFL wrote.
According to the NFL’s brief, on the first Sunday of this season, more than half of the trading volume on prediction markets — $1.8 billion out of $3.3 billion total — was related to the league.
“Any delay from the Court will result in increasing consumer harm and risk to game integrity,” the NFL wrote in its brief.
Kalshi spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana said its top priority is market integrity, and she pointed to its partnerships with the NHL, Major League Baseball and other sports organizations as evidence.
“Contrary to the NFL’s statements, the CFTC is actively policing sports-related markets, which are now listed on nearly every U.S. commodities exchange,” Diana said. “The CFTC’s ongoing rulemaking addresses many of the NFL’s supposed concerns. And those rules sit atop the same comprehensive system of federal enforcement that protects trillions of dollars of transactions in U.S. markets.”
A Polymarket spokesperson said the operator “shares the NFL’s commitment to preserving the integrity of the game,” and it is working on “a harmonized federal framework that delivers a stronger, more consistent form of integrity compared to a patchwork of disconnected state laws built for a bygone era.”
Ohio filed a brief on Wednesday urging the high court to side with New Jersey and preserve the power of all states to regulate prediction markets, as they do casino gambling and sports betting. The filing was backed by 38 states, including Republican and Democratic attorneys general from states including Arkansas, California, Illinois, Missouri, New York, South Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Roughly 20 states are involved in litigation over prediction markets, and a split has formed between appeals courts, making it more likely that the Supreme Court will take up the issue. The 6th and 9th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals have ruled in favor of states seeking to regulate prediction markets, while the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Kalshi in a ruling earlier this year.
“As between the two approaches, the NFL believes the Sixth and Ninth Circuits got it right, given the current landscape,” lawyers for the league wrote in their brief.
The NFL also is questioning the CFTC’s enforcement capabilities. In its filing, the league writes that the commission has 543 employees and their responsibilities include a range of derivatives beyond event contracts.
“Without adequate staff engaged in oversight and enforcement, even the best regulations cannot meaningfully ensure game integrity and consumer protection,” lawyers wrote in the NFL brief.
A message was left by the AP seeking comment from the CFTC.
The NFL has urged the CFTC and prediction markets to adopt a list of prohibited wagers that it feels pose the greatest threats to game integrity, according to the brief, but they have declined thus far. It also has asked the commission to adopt an age limit of 21 for trading on prediction markets, up from the current 18.
Diana said Kalshi has tried to collaborate with the NFL on market integrity, but it has received no response.
Cohen writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press writer Marc Levy contributed to this report.
Asian equity markets traded mostly lower on Wednesday, diverging from overnight gains on Wall Street where a pause in bond yield increases provided relief to technology valuations.
US stock futures were little changed, with Dow down 0.10%, S&P 500 up 0.05%, and
The United States stock market has hit an all-time high as excitement around artificial intelligence continues to fuel a buying frenzy on Wall Street.
The S&P 500, the benchmark stock index, closed 0.58 percent higher on Tuesday, topping the previous peak reached in mid-August.
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The Nasdaq Composite, which is more heavily weighted towards tech stocks, also hit a record high, finishing up 0.45 percent.
Tech stocks were among the top performers, with each of the “Magnificent Seven” apart from Meta closing higher.
Amazon led the pack with a 1.95 percent gain, followed by Microsoft and Tesla, which rose 0.78 percent and 0.51 percent, respectively.
Apple and Alphabet both rose 0.22 percent, while Nvidia gained 0.14 percent.
Meta, which has risen more than 20 percent since the launch last month of its new AI assistant, Muse, fell 0.41 percent.
Other big movers in tech included Marvell Technology, which rose 5.81 percent, and Cisco, which gained 4.54 percent.
Technology, AI
Keith Lerner, chief investment officer and chief market strategist at Truist Advisory Services in Atlanta, Georgia, said the market rally should be seen as a “technology and AI surge”.
“Every bull market has a dominant theme, and technology and AI remain this market’s dominant theme,” Lerner told Al Jazeera.
“Technology and communication services were the only two S&P 500 sectors to rise last month, while the other nine declined.”
Wall Street has shrugged off a host of challenges facing the US economy amid hyperscalers’ multibillion-dollar investments in AI.
Despite the energy crunch caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran and a sell-off of US government bonds partly driven by ballooning government debt, the market is well on track to record its fourth consecutive year of double-digit returns.
The S&P 500 has risen 14 percent so far in 2026, while the Nasdaq Composite is up 18.78 percent.
Lerner at Truist Advisory said the market rally had the potential to continue through the end of 2026 given historical trends and expectations for strong corporate earnings.
“We do not expect a straight line higher for markets,” Lerner said.
“Still, the fourth quarter of midterm-election years has produced an average gain of 7 percent and has been positive 84 percent of the time since 1950.”
Lerner said that rising interest rates posed the biggest risk to the upward trend.
“Still, on balance, the weight of the evidence suggests this bull market still has more upside potential,” he said.
Asian stock markets fell on Wednesday, with key indexes in Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong slumping in morning trading.
The Nikkei 225 in Tokyo, Kospi in Seoul and Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong were down 0.79 percent, 1.36 percent and 0.71 percent, respectively, as of 02:30 GMT.
Oil prices, which have been elevated since the start of the war on Iran, rose on Wednesday as traders weighed the fallout of fighting between forces aligned with Yemen’s internationally recognised government and the Iran-aligned Houthis.
Brent crude futures for December delivery stood at $101.45 a barrel as of 02:30 GMT, up 0.87 percent.
This beautiful city offers a quieter alternative to the UK’s busiest festive destinations, with a magnificent medieval cathedral, riverside walks and traditional pubs to warm up in.
Beautiful city in England is a ‘cosy’ destination for a winter staycation(Image: Yackers1 via Getty Images)
Christmas markets might put Bath, York and Edinburgh high on your winter travel wish list, but Norwich has plenty to tempt anyone seeking a quieter staycation.
With its medieval landmarks, independent shops and welcoming pubs, the city combines festive atmosphere with opportunities to slow down and explore. Spend a day browsing for gifts, strolling beside the river or admiring the cathedral before settling in somewhere cosy.
Norwich is Britain’s only city located within a national park — one of its major draws.
Norwich was among the leading UK staycation destinations picked by specialists at StressFreeCarRental.com in 2024. The company’s CEO, John Charnock, said: “As the nights draw in and the temperatures plummet, it’s inevitable that many of us start to feel a little down at this time of year.
“The picturesque Broads National Park has miles and miles of footpaths for visitors to truly feel at one with nature and help to keep active. Norwich is a great city to connect with the outdoors and practice ecotherapy.”
Back in the city, Norwich Cathedral is a highlight for visitors drawn to its medieval architecture. Its appeal extends beyond the building itself, with Christmas services, concerts and a light show adding to the festive experience.
On TripAdvisor, one recent visitor to the cathedral said: “Visited early on a Friday morning as the Cathedral was being prepared for the weekend with Flower arrangers busy creating displays. We had a lovely chat with one of the volunteers.
“A lovely building made of Caen Stone. We visited the grave of brave Edith Cavell. There is small gift shop if you wish to purchase something. Beautiful grounds around the building.”
While another recent visitor added: “An outstanding cathedral. Well worth visiting. Entry fee is a suggested £5. Wonderful cloisters and some very interesting and historic graves and monuments. I would definitely go back as there is so much to see.”
For Christmas shopping, Norwich offers a mix of independent retailers and familiar high street names. Its bustling marketplace, shopping centres and Norwich Lanes provide plenty of places to hunt for gifts and keepsakes.
Rather than one huge Christmas market, the city has a collection of smaller festive events showcasing local creativity. There are also multiple Christmas markets and late-night shopping on Thursdays in the run-up to Christmas.
Seasonal lights and decorations brighten the streets, while historic venues including The Assembly House and The Maids Head Hotel add to the celebrations.
When it’s time for a break from browsing, the decorated Norwich Lanes make an inviting setting for a leisurely wander. Alternatively, head out from Norwich railway station for a walk beside the River Wensum.
Along the riverside, sights include Pull’s Ferry, Cow Tower and Norwich Cathedral, with pubs such as the Compleat Angler and The Red Lion offering somewhere to stop for a drink.
For a longer dose of history, try the city’s circular walking route, which follows the Wensum and crosses ancient bridges. Medieval city walls, the imposing castle and churches are among the landmarks to look out for.
Norwich’s oldest pub, The Adam and Eve, is conveniently placed along the route. And after a day spent exploring in the winter air, one of the city’s traditional pubs with a crackling fire could be just the place to finish.
