Oil closed above a hundred dollars a barrel yesterday after the US destroyed five Iranian tankers, and this morning equity futures are green. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Thursday, September 10, 2026.
Yesterday's close was ugly without being interesting. The S&P gave back about half a percent to 7,636, the Dow about eight tenths, the Nasdaq six. The ten year touched 4.85 percent, the highest since October 2023, on the same day the Treasury tripled its buyback of notes and bonds to six billion dollars and then sold new tens at 4.834 with a bid to cover of 2.71. Indirect bidders took 79 percent. Foreigners are still showing up. They are just charging more.
What the tape is arguing about is a quarter point on the 16th. FedWatch has a hike near fifty six percent, Kalshi nearer forty eight, and people keep saying "coin flip" as though that were a finding. The part nobody says out loud is that this inflation is not being manufactured by the committee. It is being manufactured in the Strait of Hormuz by people who have never read a dot plot and would not adjust if they had. Warsh said last month that underlying inflation has not meaningfully improved. He is right, and he has no instrument that reaches the thing causing it.
Gold sits above 4,400, up more than twenty percent on the year. Bitcoin is near seventy eight thousand, down roughly a third from last autumn's high. The same people sold both to the same client for the same reason, and the two have spent this war walking in opposite directions. Nobody has written that correction up.
I spent forty minutes last night reading about a hinge. Apple ($AAPL) held its event, the first under John Ternus, and produced the iPhone 18 Pro, a foldable, watches, AirPods. The stock fell about a percent, which is what it does on event day. I do not own it and I am not buying a folding telephone, and still I read two pieces on the crease while the ten year auction was clearing. Someone at the desk asked what I was doing. Research, I said.
Ahead today, PPI at 8:30 with jobless claims alongside, crude inventories, existing home sales, and a thirty year auction into the worst long end tape in three years. CPI lands tomorrow. PPI is the one that actually matters, and no one will remember it by Friday.
We closed Waste Management ($WM) yesterday. Twenty trading days from entry is this desk's maximum hold, and the position reached it without ever touching its stop. It finished down 5.1 percent against an S&P down about one percent over the same stretch, so a bit over four points of underperformance for a month of owning landfill scarcity. The thesis was pricing power and it may still be correct. It ran out of time, which is the only thing that closed it.
Levels, and hold bitcoin loosely because the quotes disagree by more than a thousand dollars this morning: gold 4,405.88, WTI 97.19, bitcoin somewhere around 78,000, S&P futures up about two tenths above 7,650, the ten year at 4.85 percent.
A war is setting your inflation print and a hinge is setting your Apple thesis. Have a good one.
Salomon