Good Wednesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Kintanao with David Faber, Leslie Pickers in for Sarah, who has the day off here at the New York Stock Exchange.

Markets not changed too much after that pause in this ongoing tech rally yesterday. Energy is leading today about 1.5% yield still a little sticky.

10-year 414 or so, long bond 4 and 3 quarters. Coming up on today's show, the startup trying to take on in video. We'll talk to the CEO of GROC with a Q, the AI chip startup that just raised money at a nearly $7 billion valuation. Alibaba shares are spiking again today, more than doubling this year. We'll tell you what's behind today's move. And we'll head out to the Ryder Cup in Farmingdale, New York for a conversation about the big money in golf with the CEO of the PGA of America.

But first, new home sales just crossing. Diana Oleg has those numbers for us. Diana.

David, a massive beat on new home sales.

800,000 seasonally adjusted annualized rate in August.

The street was looking for 650. This is up

20.5% from July and up 15.4% from August of 2024. Now we've been talking about mortgage rates,

of course, forever, and they didn't come down in August. These numbers are based on sign contracts,

so people out shopping in August when the 30-year fix had not started its steep drop that we saw in August. These numbers are based on signed contracts, so people out shopping in August, when the 30-year fix had not started its steep drop that we saw in September. So it was well over 6.5% in the high 6% range. Now we're down at the 6.3% range. So this is a surprise. But again, we've been talking about the builders. Their incentives, Lenar's earnings last week, they said they're doing price cuts, they're doing all kinds of mortgage rate buy downs and other incentives. Let's look at the price today. The price of a new home sold was $413,500. This is 4.7% above July, and it is above 1.9% above August 2024. So prices going up on this. It's really interesting that this is happening. I guess people getting back into that market before the fall season, which is usually kind of the second most busy as opposed to the spring season. But it is a real surprise to see prices go up as well as sales

go up. Inventories, though, we're looking at a 7.4-month supply. We had been at a nine-month supply

in July. So inventories coming down, builders obviously making the push to get people in the door.

But builder's sentiment, again, wasn't so great in September.

So these numbers are really quite something.

Again, 800,000 up 20% month to month back to you.

Yeah, Diane, a lot of cross currents there.

Thanks for breaking that down for us.

Let's turn to the broader market now with stocks trading right around record levels.

Joining us here on set is

Gabriella Santos, chief market strategist for the Americas at JPMorgan asset management. So you're looking

at a lot of the cross-asset moves, and you say that the focus has now been more by monetary policy

versus the fiscal and trade and other immigration policies coming out of Washington.

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