The Dow rose and the Nasdaq fell as oil jumped nearly $2 and chip stocks hit a three-week low
The S&P 500 finished almost exactly where it started. Underneath, energy and Meta rallied, semiconductors slid on a Chinese memory-chip challenge, and a Fed voter argued for moving to restrictive policy relatively quickly. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup report before Tuesday's open.
Photo: Jan van der Wolf / Pexels
Monday's headline numbers made it look like a day off. The S&P 500 finished within a few points of where it started. The session underneath was anything but quiet: oil climbed nearly $2 a barrel, energy shares led the market, chipmakers fell to a three-week low and Meta Platforms had one of its better days of the autumn. The result was a split tape, with the Dow higher and the Nasdaq lower.
How the session ended
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about 196 points, or 0.38%, to 51,850.55. The S&P 500 slipped about 4 points, or 0.06%, to 7,807.24, and the Nasdaq Composite fell about 120 points, or 0.44%, to 27,245.90. Reuters' preliminary figures were within a few points of those closes. Small companies lagged along with tech: the Russell 2000 fell about 0.45% to 2,794.48.
The S&P 500 is still only a few points from its record close of 7,818.93, set on October 6. The Cboe Volatility Index, Wall Street's so-called fear gauge, rose about 2.5% to 15.21, still a low reading by historical standards.
The split showed up clearly by sector. Energy was the best-performing group in the S&P 500, Reuters reported, and communication services also rose with help from Meta. Technology and consumer discretionary lagged. A midday tally from ts2.tech found nine of the 11 sectors higher even as the Nasdaq fell, with decliners outnumbering advancers on both the NYSE and the Nasdaq.
Oil did the heavy lifting
Crude rose all day. West Texas Intermediate for November delivery settled $1.89 higher at $93.74 a barrel, and Brent for December delivery settled $1.93 higher at $106.65, according to Newsquawk's settlement wrap. Reuters described the move as a jump of nearly $2 a barrel after attacks on a Saudi airport.
Newsquawk also pointed to a second source of tension: Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had attacked Ukraine after President Trump announced a US-Russia energy arrangement on Friday. Prices came slightly off their highs into the settlement after Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said Russia could make additional diesel supplies available to global markets.
Exxon Mobil rose about 1.9% to $172.15. Higher oil also cut against gold, which slid as the dollar firmed. Spot gold was down about 1.5% near $4,163 an ounce late in the session, according to FXStreet, while December gold futures were about 0.5% lower.
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Chips had a rough day
The Philadelphia semiconductor index fell about 2.7% to 12,236.79, which Reuters said was a three-week low. The trigger for memory makers was China's ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, which said over the weekend it had made progress on a denser memory-chip design and planned a server-memory product based on it by the end of 2026. Micron fell about 3.9% and Sandisk about 6%. Optical-networking names, which had rebounded on Friday, fell further: Ciena and Lumentum each lost close to 10%. Nvidia slipped about 1.3%.
Not every big tech name fell. Microsoft rose about 1.1% after unveiling its third-generation Maia AI chip, and Reuters said its market value moved above $4 trillion during the session for the first time in a year. Meta gained about 3.4% after releasing Muse Wonder, the first model its superintelligence lab describes as frontier-class.
A hawkish voice before the inflation data
The cash Treasury market was closed for Columbus Day, so there was no fresh read on bond yields. The 10-year yield last stood near 5.24%, a level last seen in 2002.
Fed policy still got plenty of airtime. Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, a voting member of the rate-setting committee who dissented in favor of a hike in July, said inflation pressures look broad-based rather than concentrated in energy.
"A restrictive monetary policy stance is appropriate to ensure a timely return to 2% inflation." — Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, in prepared remarks, as reported by Reuters
She added that she generally prefers smaller adjustments made relatively quickly, rather than waiting and risking a larger correction later. She also said demand from the AI buildout is raising prices for computer and electronic components, and not only for data centers.
Market pricing still points away from an October move and toward December. CME FedWatch put the odds of an October hike at about 17.7% and of a December hike at about 84.1%, FXStreet reported early Monday. Later in the day, FXStreet cited Prime Terminal data showing roughly 20% for October and close to 90% for December. The federal funds target range is 3.75% to 4.00%.
What carries into Tuesday
Third-quarter earnings season starts in earnest before Tuesday's open, with JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup among the banks reporting. For JPMorgan, analysts expect earnings of about $5.93 a share on revenue of roughly $51.2 billion, according to a Factsheets preview, and investors will be listening for what management says about rates, credit quality and expenses.
Then come the inflation numbers. The September consumer price index is due on Wednesday, followed by producer prices and retail sales on Thursday. With oil back above $93 and at least one Fed voter openly arguing for tighter policy, those reports land in a market that finished Monday flat at the top but rotating hard underneath.
