Wall Street’s Windfall, Waymo’s London Leap, Meta’s AI Move & UK’s Modest Comeback

16th October 2025

Wall Street’s prime brokerage desks are raking in profits as hedge fund activity surges, fueling record results for top U.S. banks. Waymo gears up for its first European robotaxi launch in London, expanding its self-driving reach. Meta joins forces with Arm Holdings to supercharge AI recommendations across Facebook and Instagram. Meanwhile, the UK economy inches back into growth, offering Finance Minister Rachel Reeves a glimmer of good news ahead of her November budget. All this in today’s Read It and Eat! 

Major News 

• Wall Street’s Prime Brokerage Engines Power Up as Banks Cash In

Wall Street’s prime brokerage business is having a moment and a very profitable one at that. In the third quarter, major U.S. banks including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America reported strong gains from their prime brokerage units, which lend cash and securities to hedge funds for large trades. The sector has been supercharged this year by rising asset prices and a spike in trading activity across global markets.

For now, America’s biggest lenders are jostling for a larger slice of the market, racing both one another and their European rivals. Market volatility, fueled in part by the Trump administration’s shifting trade policies, has pushed hedge funds to ramp up activity and with leverage ratios hitting a five-year high earlier this year, business is booming. It’s a sharp contrast to three years ago, when Credit Suisse’s exit from the space following the Archegos Capital Management collapse sent shockwaves through the industry.

The numbers tell the story. JPMorgan’s equity markets revenue jumped 33% to $3.3 billion, driven largely by prime lending. Morgan Stanley saw equities revenue soar 35% to $4.1 billion a record for its prime brokerage arm while Bank of America also reported solid year-over-year growth in financing revenues. Over at Citigroup, prime balances surged 44%, helping lift equity market revenues 24% to $1.5 billion. And at Goldman Sachs, equities revenue climbed 7% to $3.7 billion, fueled by higher fees from equities financing.

“Prime brokerage revenues drove results as average client balances and financing revenues reached new records,” said Morgan Stanley CFO Sharon Yeshaya, highlighting the momentum. Goldman’s finance chief Denis Coleman echoed that optimism, calling the business a “stable source of revenue” closely tied to overall market activity. With hedge funds staying active and asset prices continuing to climb, Wall Street’s prime brokerage engines are running at full throttle for now. Yahoo.Finance 

• Waymo Gears Up for London Robotaxi Launch, Its First in Europe

Alphabet’s self-driving arm, Waymo, is preparing to launch its driverless ride-hailing service in London, marking its first entry into the European market. The company announced plans to begin test drives in the coming months, with human safety specialists behind the wheel as it works with regulators and local authorities to secure final approvals. If all goes according to plan, Waymo expects to officially roll out its robotaxi service next year.

The move comes as Waymo accelerates its global expansion. The company already operates commercial autonomous ride services across several U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Austin, with testing underway in New York City and plans to enter Miami and Washington, D.C. soon. London will be its second international city after Tokyo, where testing began earlier in 2025, highlighting Waymo’s growing ambition to scale its self-driving operations worldwide.

In London, Waymo will deploy a fleet of Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles powered by its own Waymo Driver technology. The company will rely on its existing engineering teams in Oxford and London and partner with Moove, a vehicle-financing startup backed by Uber, to handle maintenance, charging, and fleet operations. The collaboration will help streamline Waymo’s entry into a city that has been steadily positioning itself as a testing ground for advanced transport innovation.

The U.K. government’s push toward autonomous mobility provides a favorable backdrop.

With new policies designed to accelerate commercial AV pilots and London’s “Vision Zero” plan to eliminate traffic deaths by 2041, Waymo’s arrival feels well-timed. The company claims its autonomous vehicles experience five times fewer injury-causing collisions and twelve times fewer pedestrian incidents than human drivers, supported by over 100 million fully autonomous miles driven. As competition heats up including from Wayve, a U.K. startup backed by SoftBank and Microsoft, Waymo's London debut marks a pivotal step in its mission to redefine urban transportation on a global scale. CNBC 

• Meta Partners with Arm to Power AI Personalization Across Its Platforms

Meta is teaming up with Arm Holdings to boost the AI systems behind Facebook and Instagram, marking a big step in its ongoing push to make recommendations and personalization smarter and faster. The social media giant will use Arm-based data center platforms to run its AI ranking and recommendation models, the engines that decide what users see across Meta’s family of apps. The move comes as tech companies race to modernize the chip technology driving artificial intelligence workloads.

The partnership is also a major win for Arm, the SoftBank-backed chip designer that’s been steadily challenging the dominance of Intel and AMD’s x86 architecture. Arm’s chip blueprints are already the backbone of most smartphones, but now they’re gaining ground in the high-performance computing world. Both companies said Arm’s architecture can deliver higher performance with lower power consumption, a key advantage as AI models become more resource-intensive.

Meta isn’t just changing its chip strategy it’s expanding its physical footprint too. The company announced plans to invest $1.5 billion in a new data center in Texas, its 29th globally, to support the surge in AI workloads. As part of the collaboration, Meta and Arm have also worked together to adapt Meta’s AI infrastructure software for Arm’s architecture, with the improvements made open source and available to the broader developer community.

That open-source approach could help accelerate Arm’s adoption in data centers, where software compatibility has long been a sticking point. Both companies say they’ll continue adding to these open projects over time. For Meta, the move strengthens its AI backbone and for Arm, it’s another vote of confidence from one of the world’s biggest tech players. Yahoo.Finance 

• UK Economy Edges Back to Growth as Reeves Prepares for a Tough Budget

Britain’s economy finally crept back into growth in August but only just. Official data showed GDP rose 0.1% from July, offering a sliver of relief for Finance Minister Rachel Reeves as she gears up for her first major budget in November. The small uptick followed a slight downward revision for July, when the economy actually contracted by 0.1%. It’s hardly a turnaround story, but it does suggest the UK may be stabilizing after months of sluggish activity.

The International Monetary Fund added a touch of optimism this week, predicting the UK will post the second-fastest growth among the G7 next year, behind only the United States. Even so, that expected 1.3% expansion isn’t enough to offset weak revenues or prevent potential tax rises. Economists say Reeves will likely need to raise taxes to fund her spending plans and create fiscal space. “Restoring momentum depends on rebuilding business confidence and providing a bigger fiscal buffer,” said Fergus Jimenez-England from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

Still, many analysts warn that the outlook remains fragile. Deutsche Bank’s Sanjay Raja said the services and construction sectors appear to be in a “pre-budget funk,” with growth likely to come in at roughly half the Bank of England’s 0.4% forecast. He also flagged the lingering drag from U.S. trade tensions, which have dampened both household and business spending. In the three months to August, growth improved slightly to 0.3%, helped by stronger public health services, though consumer-facing sectors continued to shrink.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England is walking a fine line between stubborn inflation and a weakening economy. Governor Andrew Bailey noted that the labor market is softening, with wage growth cooling and unemployment at its highest level since 2021. Policymakers kept interest rates at 4% last month, hoping to support growth without reigniting price pressures. With retail sales slowing and tax fears mounting ahead of the November 26 budget, Reeves faces a delicate balancing act reviving growth while convincing markets and voters alike that Britain’s finances are on steady ground. CityAM 

Minor News 

• BlackRock and tech giants including Nvidia, Microsoft, and xAI team up in a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers. Reuters 

• Nvidia shares climb after HSBC boosts price target from $200 to $320, valuing the chipmaker at $7.8 trillion. Reuters 

• Nestlé to Cut 16,000 Jobs as New CEO Sparks Major Turnaround Effort. Yahoo.Finance 

• Bank of America and BNY Mellon Face Lawsuit Over Alleged Jeffrey Epstein Ties. Reuters

• YouTube Fixes Global Outage After Brief Streaming Disruption. Reuters

• Anthropic Targets Nearly Triple Revenue by 2026, Sources Say. CNBC 

• Macquarie Bets on AI and Data Centers After $40 Billion Aligned Sale. CNBC 

• Meta announces plans for a gigawatt-scale data center in Texas to power its growing AI infrastructure. CNBC 

• Apple unveils its new M5 chip alongside refreshed 14-inch MacBook Pro and iPad Pro models. CNBC