Banco Bradesco SA ADR

XP Inc. shares climbed 49.86 percent week-on-week to top US market gainers after Senator Flavio Bolsonaro's unexpected win in the first round of Brazil's general elections. Bolsonaro took 47 percent of Sunday's vote and will face leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who received 45 percent, in an October 25 runoff, with markets favoring Bolsonaro's more pro-business stance. XP jumped to a fresh four-year high of $32.29 on Friday before closing up 6.67 percent at $32.22. UBS issued a buy recommendation on XP on Thursday with a $37 price target, a 14.8 percent upside from the latest close and a 48 percent increase from its previous $25 fair value assessment. The rally spread to other Brazilian equities including Banco Bradesco, PagSeguro Digital, and StoneCo Ltd. after JPMorgan upgraded Brazilian stocks to overweight, reversing its August downgrade to neutral, citing reduced political uncertainty and potential gains of 12 to 20 percent. XP is expected to report third-quarter results in the week of November 16 to 20, 2026, after second-quarter net income rose 5 percent to R$1.384 billion and net revenues grew 9 percent to R$4.884 billion year-on-year.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian announced a new Gemini agent that lets enterprises delegate outcomes through a single prompt box, backed by 8 million paid Gemini Enterprise seats active across 4,200 companies. The platform introduces coworker agents with their own email addresses, calendar access, and directory presence, operating across Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack. The orchestration layer is built on Gemini but natively routes tasks across Anthropic Claude and over 200 other models in Model Garden, including open models like Gemma 4, a multi-model approach already used by PayPal, which routes 10 million multi-model requests every week. Google Cloud reported $20 billion in revenue for Q1 2026, a 63% year-over-year increase, with an 800% surge in generative AI product revenue, while the TPU 8i chip delivers 80% better price-performance than previous generations. Security controls include the Agent Gateway, an AI network firewall that understands the Model Context Protocol and Agent-to-Agent protocols, alongside the Agent Sandbox, with BNP Paribas deploying the tools to over 65,000 employees and Bradesco cutting document review times from an hour to five minutes.

Paramount's deal with Warner Bros. Discovery has finally closed, with the combined Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery Skydance merged entity to be called simply Skydance. Paramount shares rose roughly 3% on the news, while Ynon Kreiz of Mattel will serve as co-CEO alongside David Ellison, raising questions about how the two will split responsibilities. Elsewhere, AMD CEO Lisa Su said at a conference that demand for chips remains strong, Moderna and other pharmaceutical stocks climbed, and Banco Bradesco, the second largest bank in Brazil, jumped on rising election odds for Bolsonaro.

Brazilian assets rallied sharply after first-round election results showed Flávio Bolsonaro advancing to an Oct. 25 run-off against incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with a stronger-than-expected showing. Speculators on prediction market platform Kalshi now give Bolsonaro a more than 80% chance of winning the presidency, up from about 60% before Sunday's first round, while on Polymarket his odds jumped to 85% from 63%. Bolsonaro secured more than 47% of the votes and beat Lula's first round total by nearly 2 percentage points, despite pre-election polls that widely expected him to trail the incumbent in that initial tally. The iShares MSCI Brazil ETF was up more than 12% on Monday, U.S.-listed shares of Itau Unibanco gained 15%, Banco Bradesco surged 19%, and Brazil's local Bovespa index was up 8%. Investors broadly see Bolsonaro as more favorable to markets, as the candidate is promising greater fiscal discipline, with Brazil's deficit-to-GDP ratio at almost 10% in June.

Bradesco has completed the first pilot transaction using Bank of America's Cross-Border Real-Time Payments solution, Bank of America announced. The payment was initiated through Bradesco's existing Swift connectivity and delivered in Hong Kong dollars to a local beneficiary through Hong Kong's Faster Payment System. Bank of America's solution, announced in June 2026, is designed for high-volume, low-value payments and provides real-time tracking, full-principal delivery and payment certainty, with future availability through the CashPro digital banking platform. Christian Stolcke, head of Global Financial Institutions, Nonbank Financial Institutions and Governments in Global Payments Solutions at Bank of America, said the pilot shows how the bank can connect existing channels to real-time payment capabilities in markets around the world. Daniel Stanton, Payments Product Head in GPS at Bank of America, said completing the first transaction demonstrates the practical application of the solution and is an important step as the capability expands to more countries, currencies and client payment types. Building on the collaboration, Bradesco and Bank of America are also piloting a separate U.S. payment route through Swift to improve the speed, predictability and transparency of consumer and small-business international payments.

Oswaldo Tadeu Fernandes, an Executive Officer at Banco Bradesco S.A., reported a direct purchase of 79,782 of the company's preference shares for $1.4 million on Sept. 18, 2026, according to an SEC Form 4 filing. The acquisition raised Fernandes's total direct position to 348,575 shares, a 30% increase in the number of shares he held before the filing. Shares were acquired at a weighted-average price of $17.98, while the stock closed at $3.43 on the transaction date and stood at $3.52 as of the Sept. 21, 2026 market close. No indirect holdings or derivative securities were reported, leaving his equity position concentrated entirely in direct ownership. Banco Bradesco, one of Brazil's largest financial institutions, has a market capitalization of $37.2 billion and approximately 82,095 full-time employees.

Guidewire Software reported strong cloud deal activity and expanding AI adoption in its fiscal third quarter of 2026, closing 11 cloud deals including a seven-year expansion with Auto Club of Southern California and a strategic net-new cloud win with Bradesco Seguros in Brazil. The company also completed five ProNavigator deals, embedding AI-driven workflow automation into core insurance operations, and secured three PricingCenter wins, including its first U.S. deal at Oklahoma Farm Bureau. However, services revenue surged 32% year over year to $71.8 million, carrying a non-GAAP gross margin of just 14.3% compared with 74.1% for subscription and support, which dilutes the benefits of subscription-led growth. For fiscal 2026, Guidewire expects services revenues of about $270 million and a services gross margin of about 14%, while the stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) with a Growth Score of B but weaker Value and Momentum scores.

Banco Bradesco holds a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) and a Value grade of A, signaling it may be undervalued. The stock trades at a P/E of 7.33, well below the foreign bank industry average of 11.08, and its PEG ratio of 0.42 compares favorably to the industry's 0.67. BBD's price-to-book ratio of 1.15 is less than half the industry's 2.85, while its price-to-sales ratio of 0.8 and price-to-cash-flow ratio of 7.59 also sit far below industry averages of 2.22 and 18.20, respectively. Macro Bank, another foreign bank with a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and Value grade of A, shows similarly attractive valuations, including a forward P/E of 5.21 and a PEG of 0.38.