Oracle sent a force majeure notice on a data center it insists is on schedule, and the market decided this was a paperwork story. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Friday, September 25, 2026.
Yesterday's close was almost nothing and the bond market underneath it was not. The S&P finished flat just above 7,700, the Nasdaq added three points, the Dow gave up 162. The ten-year went through 5.2 percent in the afternoon before easing back, the highest since June 2007, and the thirty-year touched five and a half, which it last did in 2004. Gilts, bunds and Japanese governments all made fresh highs in the same week, which is the part that should bother you. October hike odds sit around seventy percent, up from the mid-sixties on Monday. In August they were single digits.
Nobody spent much of the afternoon on the other thing. Oracle (ORCL) told the developer of Project Jupiter, a Blue Owl unit, that circumstances beyond its control may excuse it from paying for a New Mexico site meant to come online in 2028. The circumstance is electricity. Oracle says such notices are commonplace at this scale and change nothing about delivery, which is probably true and is also a company putting in writing, to a counterparty, that the power may not arrive. Oracle is down roughly twenty-nine percent this year. Meta Platforms (META) is having its best month in thirteen years on an app downloaded fewer than three million times.
I kept a folder once of indefeasible-right-of-use contracts from the fiber build, the twenty-year capacity deals carriers signed in 1999 and 2000 for glass that went into the ground and in a great many cases was never lit, and I kept it because the documents were beautiful and the counterparties were gone by the time anyone tried to enforce them. It does not map. Fiber was one cost and a data center is three, and nobody in 2001 was short of electrons. What broke then was never the technology, it was the schedule.
Ahead, durable goods at half past eight and the final read on September consumer sentiment at ten. No earnings worth the name. On a morning when the long end is repricing nineteen years of assumptions, a revised survey of how a few hundred households feel will move nothing, and it will be written up anyway.
We closed Plug Power (PLUG) on Tuesday, down about three percent from entry across twenty trading days, against an S&P that added a bit over one percent over the same stretch. It reached this desk's maximum hold without hitting its stop, so the twentieth session closed it. The August case was cash burn cut in half and a fuel margin walking toward zero. Twenty sessions was not long enough to learn whether that held, and twenty sessions is what any position here gets.
Gold is somewhere near $4,255 and the screens disagree by twenty dollars in either direction, WTI is just under $92 after giving back about two percent overnight on the Iran talks, Bitcoin is around $84,400, S&P futures are up a tenth, and the ten-year is holding 5.17.
The most candid document produced about AI capital spending this week was a contract clause.
Have a good one, Salomon