America's biggest banks today served investors knock-out quarters fueled by corporate dealmaking and busy trading, but it came with a healthy bit of caution on the side.

• 🔥 Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citi and Wells Fargo all exceeded expectations for revenue and profit in Q3.
• Much of it came as confirmation of what we already knew: Frothy markets have traders trading. And companies are chasing growth — borrowing money, acquiring businesses and merging. All of that means fees for Wall Street.

🗣️ "We're in an environment at the moment where CEOs think that the opportunity to get things done strategically is now possible, after being in a period of time where they felt it was not," Goldman CEO David Solomon said on this morning's earnings call.

• "I think it was the busiest summer we've had in like a long time in terms of announced M&A activity," JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum said.

⚠️ Yes, but: Some risks were flagged too. Barnum noted that customers' personal savings rate was a little bit lower than expected in the quarter. People continued to spend "robustly," while incomes trended a bit lower.

• Goldman's Solomon warned again of "investor exuberance" in stocks, fueled by AI investments.
• And JPMorgan CEO Jaime Dimon warned that, although he was comfortable with JPMorgan's exposure, the collapse of subprime auto lender Tricolor Holdings isn't likely to be a one-off.

Zoom in: "When you see one cockroach, there are probably more," Dimon said of potential issues lurking with the newer nonbank lenders in the industry. "And so everyone should be forewarned on this one."

Threat level: Problems in credit market often don't present themselves until things go bad, Dimon said. "We've had a benign credit environment for so long that I think you may see credit in other places deteriorate a little bit more than people think when, in fact, there's a downturn."

Advanced Micro Devices scored another win in the AI race today, as Oracle announced it will deploy 50,000 AMD-powered GPUs next year, and more after that, Pete writes.

• 📈 AMD shares jumped nearly 4% on the news, before settling to close up 0.8%.
• 📉 Shares of rival chipmakers fell, with Nvidia closing down 4.4% and Broadcom down 3.5%.

The big picture: "Investors are weighing competition in artificial-intelligence chips," Barron's noted today.

• "The move is the latest sign that cloud companies are increasingly offering AMD's graphics processing units as an alternative to Nvidia's market-leading GPUs for artificial intelligence," CNBC wrote.

Zoom in: Oracle will use AMD's Instinct MI450 chips, with the launch being the first publicly available AI supercluster using the new chips.

The bottom line: Nvidia still dominates the world of AI chipmaking. But it's increasingly looking like there's room for more players.

🤖 🛒 Walmart is teaming up with OpenAI to turn shopping into a conversation — letting customers plan meals, restock essentials and check out directly through ChatGPT. (Axios)

🪫 General Motors is taking a $1.6 billion charge on its EV business, saying it was cutting back on manufacturing capacity as demand sinks. (WSJ)

Pop-Tarts and Doritos are bulking up, Axios' Kelly Tyko writes.

• Big Food is betting on protein — rebranding nostalgic snacks as functional fuel for a more nutrition-conscious crowd.

Driving the news: Kellanova said today that Pop-Tarts Protein will debut in November with 10 grams of protein per serving and three flavors: strawberry, blueberry and brown sugar cinnamon.

• PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta told investors last week that the company has "a lot of innovation on protein," pointing to a Doritos product, a Starbucks coffee bottled drink and the relaunch of Muscle Milk.

The big picture: Protein-packed foods and drinks are flexing toward a $100 billion market by 2030, up from $67 billion in 2023, per Bloomberg, citing Grand View Research.

• The boom is driven by everyone from gym-goers to GLP-1 users chasing snacks that satisfy and strengthen.

The bottom line: Even Pop-Tarts want in on the gains.