Palantir’s direct listing experiment generally went well, with the company’s shares beginning trading up nearly 40% from the $7.25 reference price set Tuesday evening. Fellow direct lister Asana also had a good first day on the NYSE – NYTimes and WSJ and MarketWatch and Law360

Even after a rough month, stocks closed up higher on Wednesday to wrap up September and Q3—a “second consecutive quarter of dramatic gains, continuing a historic stock-market recover that few predicted in the depths of the March downturn” – WSJ

Still, Tuesday night’s [ahem] interesting debate prompted the Times to chart how markets that have shown a willingness to look well past the latest political and global drama of the moment are increasingly fixated on the coming election – NYTimes

The Federal Reserve announced this week that it’s extending restrictions for the U.S.’s biggest banks another three months, keeping its prohibitions on share buybacks and a cap on dividend payments in place for the lenders, all of whom have more than $100 billion in assets – WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is reportedly working on a counteroffer to the House’s recent $2.2 trillion Covid stimulus plan that he’s talking through with House leadership – NYTimes and Bloomberg

In the meantime, job cuts are picking up. U.S. insurance giant Allstate will lay off nearly 4000 employees “in claims, sales and support roles” as part of a restructuring plan it announced last December – WSJ and Bloomberg

Goldman’s resuming its own cuts as part of its broader plan to eliminate about 1% of its workforce – Bloomberg

And American and United Airlines are axing 32,000 jobs “after lawmakers were unable to agree on a broad coronavirus relief package” – WSJ

The Brexit train just keeps on chugging, and for Britain, that mean the EU will move ahead with legal action against it over “Brexit legislation that the government in London has said would permit it to break international law.” Boris and friends now have 30 days to respond  – NYTimes

So much for the meek inheriting the earth (at least when it comes to the business world). Instead, the pandemic has only hastened the growth and dominance of large companies while “their small business competitors have faced something of an apocalypse,” with more than “400,000 small businesses” already closing “and millions more . . . at risk” – NYTimes

HP will pay $6 million to resolve SEC claims that it “violated antitrust law in its effort to boost sales of ink supplies” – Bloomberg and Reuters and Law360

Officials are blaming a “technical glitch” for the halt to trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Thursday, one of the “worst ever” breakdowns for the dominant exchange in the world’s third-largest economy – NYTimes

A recent massive attack on Universal Health Services Inc., one of “the nation’s largest hospital chains,” is an unfortunate case study of how ransomware is morphing from a software-crippling annoyance to a life-threatening plague – WSJ

Gotta hand it to the Germans, who embraced the meta and are offering a new exhibit that displays both the originals of Russian avant-garde artists and their fakes, which have “polluted this corner of the art market for decades” – NYTimes

Stay safe.