Asian equities climbed for a sixth consecutive day as signs the US will do more trade deals after striking a pact with Japan injected fresh vigor into stocks. Megacap tech is in focus after a number of key earnings reports. SK Hynix outlined plans to quicken spending on advanced memory chip capacity after reporting record earnings, reflecting surging AI demand and a drive to stay ahead of rivals. The South Korean company notched a bigger-than-expected 68% jump in operating income in the June quarter. Stateside, shares of Google parent Alphabet climbed in after-hours trading on better-than-expected revenue. Meantime, CEO Elon Musk warned of a hard year ahead for Tesla, adding to the automaker's woes after reporting one of its worst quarters of the last decade. We get reaction to the Tesla story from Michael Dunne, CEO at Dunne Insights. He speaks with Bloomberg's Shery Ahn and Haidi Stroud-Watts on The Asia Trade.

Plus - in her latest column, Bloomberg Opinion's Karishma Vaswani says hearsay about the inner workings of the Politburo has a long tradition of being wholly inaccurate. With that, intrigue over Chinese President Xi Jinping's future is no less than speculative, and the result of a succession crisis of his own making. She joins us to dissect the coded signals coming out of Beijing, and why the obsession with Xi's fate reflects the West's blind spots about Chinese politics.