This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Monster jobs report
The U.S. economy added 254,000 jobs in September, according to the U.S. Labor Department. That figure smashes the expected 150,000 Dow Jones consensus forecast and is far higher than the upwardly revised 159,000 in August. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1% from 4.2% the month before. Those numbers suggest a recession’s unlikely.

‘Path to a soft landing’
September’s blockbuster jobs report “gives the Federal Reserve a fairly open glide path to a soft landing,” writes CNBC’s Jeff Cox. Despite that optimistic outlook, the fact that the jobs report managed to defy the calculations of so many Wall Street analysts — and perhaps even the U.S. Federal Reserve — raises questions about what we can truly know about the economy.

Reversing losses
Major U.S. indexes rose Friday, erasing the previous four days’ of losses to close the week higher. The yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury added around 12 basis points, almost hitting 4%. The pan-European Stoxx 600 index gained 0.44%. French videogame publisher Ubisoft surged over 30% after Tencent and Ubisoft’s founding Guillemot family were reported to be considering a buyout of the company.

EU tariffs on Chinese EVs
The European Commission voted on Friday to impose tariffs on Chinese battery electric vehicles imported into the European Union. The Commission said in June that the Chinese EV industry “benefits from unfair subsidization.” But not everyone supports the measure. Germany’s against the decision, and Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volkswagen have criticized it.

[PRO] Next up this week
After last week’s surprising jobs report, investors will be awaiting the consumer and producer price index reports for September, coming out on Thursday and Friday respectively. But one analyst thinks the inflation report will matter less than the jobs report. The Fed’s minutes will also be released this week, giving an insight into its jumbo rate cut.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the U.S. Labor Department arrived at the final tally for September’s jobs number. I imagine a harried official yelling, “Did someone use PRODUCT instead of SUM in Excel?”

Because it seems only a confusion between the multiplication and addition functions could lead us to the completely unexpected number of 254,000 nonfarm payrolls added in September — around 70% higher than what economists had expected.

By comparison, August’s number was only 12% off the estimate, and even July’s hugely disappointing report, which sparked the sell-off in early August, was “merely” 37% lower than forecast.

It’s likely the Fed was also caught off guard. “It is doubtful” the Fed would have slashed rates by half a percentage point “if it had known this report would be so strong,” said David Royal, chief financial and investment officer at financial services firm Thrivent.

Indeed, the report demolished expectations so thoroughly it calls into question assumptions and models about the economy. That’s perhaps why stocks rose only tentatively on its release.

The S&P 500 climbed 0.9%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.81% and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.22%.

Still, those numbers were big enough they erased the losses of the previous four trading days. For the week, S&P rose 0.22%, the Dow ticked up 0.09% and the Nasdaq increased 0.1% — a huge jump, considering it was down more than 1% at Thursday’s close.

Perhaps markets’ measured response on Friday was muted because the jobs report, while reaffirming a recession is a ghost banished for now, almost guarantees the Fed will reduce rates by a quarter point — at most — during its November meeting.

There’s no need to be a fly on the wall when the Fed discusses rates. They release minutes of their meeting, anyway. Jobs data is so crucial to the economy now I’d continue buzzing around the Labor Department’s office.

– CNBC’s Jeff Cox, Alex Harring and Lisa Kailai Han contributed to this story.   

Shares of French video game publisher Ubisoft surged more than 30% on Friday after a media report that Tencent and the firm’s founding Guillemot family are considering a potential buyout of the company.

Bloomberg News reported Friday that Tencent and the Guillemot family, which are both minority shareholders of Ubisoft, are considering a buyout among other options after the company lost more than half its market value this year.

One possibility currently being discussed is a combination of Tencent and the Guillemot family partnering up to take the company private, the business news agency reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Shares of Ubisoft spiked 33.5% by the market close Friday following publication of the report.

Ubisoft declined to comment on the Bloomberg News report. Tencent was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC Friday.

The European gaming giant, which is most known for its popular “Assassin’s Creed” franchise, has been in a state of uncertainty lately amid investor concerns over its lackluster triple-A games pipeline and the overall management of the company.

Last week, Ubisoft said it was postponing the release of the next title in its popular games series, “Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” by three months to Feb. 14, 2025, after “softer than expected” demand for the firm’s “Star Wars Outlaws” game, which launched in August.

Ubisoft also cut its net bookings guidance for its 2025 fiscal year to around 1.95 billion euros, below the 2.32 billion euros Ubisoft reported for its 2024 fiscal year.

Tencent, which owns a roughly 10% stake in Ubisoft, is one of China’s largest technology firms. The company, best known in China for its strong market share in gaming, is behind the Chinese multiplayer online battle arena game “Honor of Kings” which it publishes under its TiMi Studio Group publisher arm.

Speculation over a potential takeover comes as Ubisoft shares are trading at decade lows. Last week, AJ Investments, an activist investor with a less than 1% stake in Ubisoft, said it had amassed the support of 10% of Ubisoft’s shareholder base to push for changes at the company.

In an open letter last Thursday, the private equity firm said it had engaged “industry experts” as potential replacements for the current Ubisoft management to realize a turnaround strategy at Ubisoft. It called for Ubisoft to sell itself to private equity groups or Tencent.

Following Ubisoft’s guidance cut and a performance in the second quarter that “fell short” of the company’s expectations, CEO Yves Guillemot announced that the firm’s executive committee would launch a review to “further improve” execution.

Along with delays to its premier title, Ubisoft is also grappling with a games industry-wide slump. The global games market is set to grow only 2.1% year-over-year in 2024, according to research firm Newzoo — no where near the surging growth levels witnessed during the 2020 and 2021 Covid-19 pandemic years.

James Lockyer, technology research analyst at U.K. investment bank Peel Hunt, told CNBC earlier this week that part of the problem for game publishers today is that gamers are devoting more of their time to older games than to newer titles.

“More choice plus a cost-of-living squeezed wallet has meant consumers’ cash has been spread more thinly, leading to revenues and ROIs [return on investment] of those games often coming out below expectations,” Lockyer told CNBC via email.