Sector Update: Financial

09:01 AM EDT, 09/17/2026 (MT Newswires) -- Financial stocks were rising premarket Thursday, with the State Street Financial Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLF) advancing by 0.8%. The Direxion Daily Financial Bull 3X Shares (FAS) was up 2.5% and its bearish counterpart Direxion Daily Financial Bear 3X Shares (FAZ) was 2.2% lower. Affirm (AFRM) shares were up more than 5% after the company launched a transformer-based machine-learning model for credit underwriting in the US.