The Trial Balance is CFO.com’s weekly preview of stories, stats and events to help you prepare.
Part 1 — DeepSeek causes AI market frenzy
DeepSeek, a China-based AI developer, has drawn attention from Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike. The company has reportedly matched or begun “surpassing” generative AI capabilities with significantly lower costs than American developers like OpenAI, Meta and X — all while keeping its AI models open source. Currently, DeepSeek is the most downloaded mobile app in multiple countries, including the U.S., U.K. and Canada.
DeepSeek’s R1, which “is comparable to OpenAI o1 across math, code and reasoning tasks,” according to its website, is open source alongside Meta’s Llama and X’s Grok. OpenAI said its nonprofit arm intends to use its resources to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity” and has shifted to closed-sourcing its tools for cybersecurity reasons.
DeepSeek’s emergence also threatens the longevity of chip producers, who flourished off a “widespread bet” that new AI markets would create longstanding demand for chip development and infrastructure. However, experts have told Reuters that DeepSeek’s emergence may throw a wrench into the smart chip production industry and alarm hovering investors.
“If it’s true that DeepSeek is the proverbial ‘better mousetrap,’ that could disrupt the entire AI narrative that has helped drive the markets over the last two years,” Brian Jacobsen, chief economist of Annex Wealth Management, told Reuters. “It could mean less demand for chips, less need for a massive buildout of power production to fuel the models and less need for large-scale data centers. However, it could also mean that AI becomes more accessible and helps kickstart the development of a wide array of useful applications.”
Part 2 — This week
Here’s a list of important market events slated for the week ahead.
Monday, Jan. 27
- New home sales, Dec.
Tuesday, Jan. 28
- Durable goods orders, Dec.
- S&P Case-Shiller home price index (20 cities), Nov.
- Consumer confidence, Jan.
Wednesday, Jan.29
- Advanced retail inventories, Dec.
- Advanced wholesale inventories, Dec.
- FOMC interest-rate decision
- Fed Chair Powell press conference
Thursday, Jan. 30
- Initial jobless claims, week of Jan. 25
- GDP, Q1
Friday, Jan. 31
- PCE index, Dec.
- Core PCE index, Dec.
- Chicago Business Barometer (PMI), Jan.
Part 3 — Investor engagement tips, Rimini Street CFO Q&A, Quincy, Mass. blockchain bonds
This week, CFO.com will publish a 2025 investor engagement checklist (1/28), a Q&A with Michael Perica of Rimini Street (1/30), a story highlighting ten common errors in the buy-side due diligence process (1/30) and a story with Eric Mason, CFO of Quincy Massachusetts, on his unprecedented sale of a municipal blockchain bond sale to JPMorgan (1/31).
