Concord Resources research director Duncan Hobbs said the aluminium market is far larger than 25 years ago, leaving current LME inventories extremely low relative to market size. LME aluminium on-warrants were 245,350 tonnes on July 24, the lowest since April 2025. Hobbs warned the market may be "overly complacent" about supply risk despite forecasts of a 2027–28 surplus; ongoing Strait of Hormuz disruptions are hampering Gulf smelters' imports of feedstock and exports of metal.

China A-shares rallied into the close: ChiNext up over 3% after late-session acceleration, Beijing Stock Exchange 50 +2.2%, Shanghai Composite +1.14%. Nearly 5,200 stocks advanced and 115 stocks hit limit-up.

LongCat2.0 was officially open-sourced this month. The 1.6T-parameter model has an average active size of about 48B (dynamic activation range 33B–56B) and natively supports a 1M-token context. It is the first trillion-parameter model to complete end-to-end training and inference on 50,000 domestically made compute cards. Meituan today launched CatPaw, a full-scenario AI Agent platform powered by LongCat2.0, aiming to move the model from "can run" to "use well." CatPaw provides an out-of-the-box AI workstation and hosted enterprise Agent development. The platform is already deployed internally at scale, covering 90k employees and 30k Agents, and has been validated in multiple live business scenarios.