Growing up, Charles R. Schwab says he did “everything” he could to make money after school and during the summers. He sold ice cream, mowed lawns and caddied at Santa Barbara’s Montecito Country Club, where he taught himself to golf, foreshadowing the meetings on the links in his future business career. On Thursday, “Chuck,” as he prefers to be called, earned a recreational round or two.

The namesake brokerage firm he founded and co-chairs reported record quarterly revenue (up 27% year-over-year to $6.1 billion) and profit (up 67% to $2.3 billion), and said total client assets rose 17% to a record $11.6 trillion in the three months through September. On top of beating Wall Street performance expectations, Charles Schwab’s results underscored how interest in this year’s bull market has powered a strong run of financial sector earnings reports this week.

A Generational Event

For four quarters in a row, over a million new brokerage accounts have been opened with Charles Schwab. CEO Rick Wurster noted during an earnings call on Thursday that the influx has led to a flurry of activity: Schwab’s daily average trading volume, from which it generates commissions and fees, reached 7.4 million in the third quarter, a 30% year-over-year increase. The surge can be explained, at least in part, by dramatic market swings due to Washington’s trade policy shifts and the artificial intelligence boom, which incentivized more borrowing among investors to get in on the action by buying stocks. Charles Schwab’s margin balances of $97 billion at the end of the third quarter were up 16% from the end of 2024.

Results from other financial firms this week also showed that clients from scrappy retail traders to high-net-worth jetsetters are hankering for equities and investments. Wealth units at Bank of America (revenue up 19% year over year to $1.3 billion), Goldman Sachs (up 17% to $4.4 billion), Morgan Stanley (up 13% to $8.2 billion) and more notched high marks. Customer assets at Schwab competitor Interactive Brokers rose 40% to $757.5 billion, and daily trades there rose 47% to 3.86 million. Then there’s this year’s seismic rally from retail-focused brokers like Robinhood, whose shares are up over 250% since the beginning of January. And speaking of which:

• Wurster said Schwab is drawing young people usually associated with the newer cohort of digital-native brokers: Gen Z households, he said, account for roughly one-third of new investors this year and millennials another third.
• Wurster said it’s “hard to know whether this level of engagement will persist or grow,” but added the sophistication of investors indicates they’re not fair-weather: “We’ve seen our traders sell the rip and buy the dip, so I think our engagement is likely to be more sustainable than others.”

Charles Schwab shares fell 1% to $93.41 in a down session for the S&P 500. But Raymond James analysts, seeing upside, hiked their price target for the stock to $110 from $104.

Crypto Crazy: Wurster said Charles Schwab is exploring new ways to give investors access to private companies, given the growing ranks of highly valued firms putting off IPOs. It also has a spot crypto offering slated to launch next year, and Schwab clients have already shown a voracious appetite for the sector through crypto exchange-traded funds: Wurster said they hold 20% of all crypto ETF assets in America.

Fears of an AI bubble may be pervasive, but TSMC’s “No China? No Problem” attitude provides a strong counterargument.

In its blockbuster earnings call on Thursday, the world’s premier chip fab argued that there’s more than enough demand for AI-powering chips around the world to offset the potential loss of clients in the increasingly cordoned-off Chinese market. In fact, demand for the company’s chip-making expertise has been so strong that it raised its 2025 outlook for the second quarter in a row.

Fab-ulous Results

Saying that the entire AI industry, sans China, is “more than enough” for TSMC is likely underselling it. The company still makes more than 90% of the world’s most advanced AI chips and is a leading supplier for nearly every major tech firm, which means it finds itself firmly at the center of the roughly $1 trillion spending boom planned for AI infrastructure around the globe in the coming years. In its third quarter, that spending boom manifested in revenue of $32.8 billion, a 30% year-over-year increase, and net income of $14.8 billion, an expectations-beating jump of 39% year over year.

The robust results come as US trade restrictions have effectively blocked TSMC from selling advanced chips to China all year, and those barriers are only increasing. In early September, the US government revoked TSMC’s authorization to ship to its chipmaking site in Nanjing, China. (One downstream effect: The Wall Street Journal reported in August that Alibaba has begun producing new AI chips by relying on a new and unnamed Chinese company whose tech is catching up to TSMC.) Still, TSMC stressed on Thursday that the trade tensions are hardly even registering as a headache:

• During the earnings call, the company projected revenue growth for 2025 to be in the middle range of 30% to 40%, up from its earlier projections of 30%. AI-related revenue is expected to double in 2025, and CEO C.C. Wei predicted it will grow at a rate exceeding 40% in the next few years, even with limited access to the Chinese market.
• TSMC has never been especially reliant on mainland sales, anyhow. China accounted for 8% of its net revenue in the most recent quarter, compared with a pre-trade war norm of around 11% per quarter; its Nanjing manufacturing base accounts for just 3% of its total manufacturing capacity.

Made in the USA: Still, the trade wars are reshaping the company in other ways. TSMC pledged some $100 billion earlier this year to increase manufacturing capacity in Arizona, and it’s also making investments in Japan and Germany. It plans to begin mass production of advanced chips in Arizona this year, though to what extent remains an open question. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posited last month that half of TSMC’s production could soon occur in the US — a suggestion that Taiwan government officials promptly shot down. In other words: Virtually all AI roads still lead to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Whether they will always lead to Taiwan itself is another question.

Insurance companies make money when it’s 70 degrees and sunny, with a catastrophe-light season padding Travelers’ profits in the most recent quarter. The insurer’s net income jumped 50% in the three months through September compared to the same time last year, and its annual profits are up 30% so far this year.

The company’s revenue only rose 5%, however, and premiums increased by just 1%. Instead, Travelers earnings benefited from saving money on claim payouts: Catastrophe losses of $402 million tallied up to less than half of the $939 million it doled out last year, when Hurricane Helene and other severe storms caused serious damage.

Travelers’ stock dipped this week, continuing an insurance-industry stock rout that kicked off Wednesday after Progressive’s weaker-than-expected earnings. Insurers including Allstate, Chubb and Marsh McLennan saw their stock fall, too, as investors grew concerned about slowing growth in the sector.

Eye of the Storm

The third quarter of the year, from July to September, is typically the most expensive time of year for insurers because of monsoons, hurricanes and fires. But this season was less catastrophic than usual, with global economic losses of $50 billion and insured losses of $15 billion, the lowest totals in nearly 20 years. Compare that with $193 billion in average third-quarter economic losses for the past decade. Annual losses are also trending 37% below their 10-year average.

The quiet summer gives insurance companies a breather to save up for future natural disasters, which experts are sure are on their way:

• Insurance companies have adapted to the increasing frequency of natural disasters and found ways to pass the costs on to consumers. Property insurers reported record profits last year as they increased premiums and withdrew from the most disaster-prone areas. Homeowners insurance premiums rose 10% last year and more than 20% in some states, while the average cost of car insurance climbed 26%.
• At the same time, insurers have pulled out of the highest-risk areas, with Allstate, State Farm and others limiting coverage in fire- and flood-prone states like California and Florida.

Cloudy Forecast: With rising prices and limited options, people could be shopping around for cheaper plans or opting for state-owned insurance plans of last resort. Insurers have declined to renew millions of plans in high-risk areas, where it’s difficult to make a profit. But if natural disasters become as common as scientists predict, insurers may find themselves with fewer and fewer customers. And those customers, meanwhile, are left with few options to protect themselves financially.