Editor's Note: The "This Week's Bull Stocks in Hong Kong and US Markets" column keeps up with market trends every week, providing a review of the weekly performance of the Hong Kong and US stock markets. It helps investors identify hot sectors, strong individual stocks, and significant news of the week, in order to find investment themes with potential for profit.

This week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (. DJI.US ) rose by 1.66% to 5,286.79 points; during the same period, the S&P 500 Index (. SPX.US ) rose by 0.05% to 7,663.43 points; the Nasdaq Composite Index (. IXIC.US ) fell by 0.5% to 2,6008.86 points.

$EcoFi ($EFX.US) has seen a cumulative increase of over 16% this week. EPS exceeded expectations, and AI has driven an improvement in productivity. The company has raised its annual profit margin expansion guidance.

Equifax demonstrated strong capabilities for diversified market revenue growth and profit margin expansion in Q3, despite facing macroeconomic headwinds from the significant weakening of the U.S. mortgage market due to rising interest rates. Through productivity improvements driven by AI and strict cost management, management successfully offset the revenue shortfall from the mortgage business and raised its full-year profit margin expansion targets.

Analysts are focusing on the potential impact of FHFA shifting to Bi-merge, which management estimates will affect annual revenue by about $80 million, but they consider it controllable. They are also monitoring the progress of adopting VantageScore and the strong signing momentum in government business (which lays the foundation for growth in 2027). Overall, the company's fundamentals are solid, and the empowerment provided by AI combined with the cloud-native architecture is beginning to translate into substantial financial returns.

Ecofi Corporation provides information solutions and human resources business process outsourcing services. It operates through the following business divisions: U.S. Information Solutions, Labor Solutions, and International. The U.S. Information Solutions division includes consumer and business information services, mortgage origination information, financial marketing services, and identity management. The Labor Solutions division covers employment, income, and Social Security number verification services, as well as complementary wage-based transaction and employment tax management services. The International market provides information, technology, and service support for debt collection and recovery management in Canada, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region.

$ Zscaler ( ZS.US )$ has seen a cumulative increase of nearly 15% in the past PHP weeks. The PHP vulnerability has led to an increase in global demand for network security, and the company has also announced support for the NVIDIA OpenShell architecture.

A PHP vulnerability that had lay dormant for over a decade was independently discovered in August this year by cybersecurity companies Calif and Wiz with the help of AI. Subsequently, all parties collaborated to fix it under confidentiality for nearly two months. However, on the day before the patch was to be released, which was the 20th local time, information about the vulnerability was leaked online ahead of time. The security team of PHP was forced to confirm and announce the release date, and hackers took advantage of this to launch an attack just a few hours before the patch went live.

In addition, the company announced on Wednesday that it supports NVIDIA's OpenShell reference architecture, thereby enhancing the security and governance capabilities of autonomous driving artificial intelligence agents in enterprise environments. This integration is aimed at helping organizations prevent unauthorized access, protect sensitive data, and reduce potential damages caused by controlled or unexpected behavior of artificial intelligence agents.

Zscaler is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company that specializes in providing cloud-native cybersecurity solutions to major enterprise customers. The products of Zscaler can be roughly divided into Zscaler Internet Access (which provides secure access to external applications) and Zscaler Private Access (which provides secure access to internal applications). The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, and went public in 2018.

$Thomson Reuters ($TRI.US) has risen by over 13% this week, launching tax and auditing ($AI) solutions that provide a basis for informed decision-making.

Thomson Reuters announces the launch of a new generation of CoCounsel tax, audit, and accounting solutions. These solutions are designed to streamline work processes, comply with relevant regulations, and deliver final results reviewed by professionals.

Although many artificial intelligence tools are now capable of writing and executing code, precision alone is not sufficient to ensure the accuracy of professional work. Taxation and auditing tasks often involve a great deal of judgment: which rule applies, how to interpret specific facts of clients, and what legal basis should be followed during a particular period. The new generation of CoCounsel tax, auditing, and accounting solutions is designed precisely for this purpose, aiming to ensure that these judgments are error-free—each calculation is based on the appropriate legal foundation, and the reasoning process is fully carried through to the final result. At the same time, the system provides full transparency, allowing professionals to clearly understand the decision-making path, thus enabling them to confidently verify the work results.

Thomson Reuters' Chief Product Officer stated that the new generation of CoCounsel tax, audit, and accounting products has redefined professionals' expectations for AI: not only can they answer questions, but they can also plan work processes, perform calculations, comply with relevant regulations, and deliver complete results that professionals can review and sign off on. He mentioned that these products are built upon the company's decades of accumulated authoritative content, professional expertise, and deep integration with real-world work scenarios.

On the other hand, the stocks that performed poorly this week are as follows:

Edit / Joe Liang