Good Afternoon. On November 4, 1922, Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb in Egypt. Its rooms held more than 5,000 objects, offering a rare look at an ancient royal burial. Recording and preserving the find would take years.

—Rosie, Wyatt, Evan & Conor

In this edition

Supplied by StockTwits. ONEQ tracks the Nasdaq Composite; IEF holds U.S. Treasury bonds; GLD tracks gold. These three references are ETFs.

The read: Stocks surged after Democrats won both houses of Congress. The S&P 500 closed up 1.6%, and the Nasdaq gained 1.4%. The Dow added more than 1,500 points. Hospital owners and stores serving lower-income shoppers helped lead the rally. Oil prices fell, and Treasury yields moved lower.

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CVS spent years putting health care under one roof. Now it plans to give the pharmacy its own address.

The company plans to split into two public companies, Axios reported. CVS Health would keep Aetna, Caremark, Oak Street Health and Signify Health. CVS Pharmacy would hold the retail and mail pharmacies, MinuteClinic and Health100.

The target is the first half of 2028. This is a plan for the business, not a change taking place at your local counter today.

CVS also reported $108.4 billion in third-quarter sales, up 5.4% from a year earlier. Adjusted profit per share rose to $2.09 from $1.60. That measure leaves out certain costs and gains.

It raised its full-year cash-flow forecast to at least $15.5 billion, from at least $11.5 billion. That’s money generated by the business, before spending on long-term assets.

Higher health costs still call for caution, CVS said. The recovery and the proposed split will now run on separate clocks.

Most people couldn't tell you what scandium is for, but everyone knows what happens when roads go unsalted. North America keeps running short, and Atlas Salt (TSXV: SALT) is building a shovel-ready mine in Newfoundland, three days by ship from Boston, with C$188 million in projected yearly free cash flow.

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💻 AMD’s data centers do the heavy lifting

AMD’s data-center sales nearly doubled to $8.5 billion in the third quarter. They grew 97% from a year earlier as demand rose for server and AI chips. Total sales jumped 45% to $13.4 billion, though the boom wasn’t shared across the whole company.

Gaming sales fell 40% to $773 million, dragged down by chips for game consoles. AMD expects about $17 billion in fourth-quarter sales, putting more weight on its server and AI business to keep growth going.

💼 Private hiring holds its pace

Private employers added 86,000 jobs in October, according to ADP. That matches September’s revised gain, rather than marking a speedup in the pace of hiring. Service businesses added 82,000 jobs, compared with just 4,000 at companies that make goods.

Professional and business services lost 27,000 jobs, their third month of cuts. The total gain masks those weak spots in the job market. ADP counts private payrolls, so these figures don’t include government jobs or replace the Labor Department’s separate report.

🍟 Bigger checks, fewer U.S. customers

McDonald’s customers spent more per visit in the U.S., but fewer came through the door. Sales at established U.S. stores slipped 0.2% in the third quarter. Higher checks largely offset the drop in visits, keeping the decline small without solving the traffic problem.

Global same-store sales rose 1.5%, helped by stronger markets abroad. Total company sales grew 1% to $7.16 billion, while net profit rose 9% to $2.49 billion. The U.S. business still needs more customers, not just bigger orders from those who show up.

Uber handled more rides and deliveries. Its sales growth didn’t keep up with the value moving through the app.

Third-quarter bookings rose 20% to $59.8 billion. That’s what customers spent across its services, before drivers and other partners get their shares. Uber’s own sales rose 10% to $14.8 billion.

Changes to how some markets run and record sales held revenue growth back by eight percentage points, Uber said. The gap doesn’t mean customer demand grew only half as fast.

Trips rose 16% to 4.1 billion. Cash left after spending on long-term assets reached $2.5 billion, up 14%.

Uber expects $63.25 billion–$65.25 billion in fourth-quarter bookings. Those are customer bookings, not a promise of the same amount in Uber sales.

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Novo Nordisk raised its outlook. That still leaves room for its business to shrink this year.

Its 2026 forecast runs from a 2% decline to a 2% gain in adjusted sales and operating profit. That profit measure comes before interest and tax. The forecast also strips out shifts in exchange rates.

Third-quarter sales rose 6% to 79.2 billion Danish kroner. Reported operating profit fell 3%, while adjusted operating profit rose 34%. Those figures include shifts in exchange rates.

The adjusted figure leaves out 8.7 billion kroner in noncash charges, tied to a drug project and factory changes. Last year’s figures also had big costs to reshape the firm.

Wegovy pill sales reached 5.4 billion kroner in the quarter. Its rollout is growing, but the full-year forecast still stops short of promising growth.

🇨🇳 China’s service firms feel the squeeze

China’s service sector kept growing in October, but at its slowest pace since July. The RatingDog survey index fell to 50.8 from 51.6; anything above 50 signals growth. Firms cut selling prices for a second month as costs rose faster. More business isn’t much comfort when each sale gets harder to profit from.

🚘 BMW lowers its profit target

BMW now expects its car business to earn roughly minus 0.5% to plus 0.5% of sales as operating profit this year. Its old target was 1%–3%. Extra costs to reshape the business will weigh on the fourth quarter. BMW kept its forecast for more than €2.5 billion in car-business free cash flow.

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🥸 Dad Joke of the Day

Q: Why do bees have sticky hair?

A: Because they use honeycombs.

📖 Vocab Word of the Day · Corporate action

Corporate action: A change a company makes that can affect the shares you own. A stock split, a merger or a new company spun out of an old one can all count.

In a sentence: CVS’s planned breakup would be a corporate action.

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