The bond market is closed for Columbus Day, which is convenient, because the 10-year at a 24-year high is the number nobody wanted to discuss. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Monday, October 12, 2026.
Friday the S&P closed up about six tenths at 7,811, a hair under last week's record, with the Dow adding four hundred odd points. Futures are a few tenths firmer this morning, though how many depends on which screen you read. Equities are open. Treasuries are not, so the market gets a full session to price risk without the instrument that actually prices it.
Meanwhile, gold. In January it was above 5,600 dollars an ounce. Since then we have had a war that began in February, Brent over 100, tankers hit in the Strait of Hormuz this month, a Fed that hiked in September for the first time since 2023, headline inflation at 3.4% and expected Wednesday at 3.6%, and a term premium at its highest since 2014. Every argument for owning gold arrived on schedule. Gold is down about a quarter from that high, and off nearly three percent in the last month, on days when the headline was always something else. I have not seen it mentioned once in three days of reading.
The last time the 10-year printed 5.35, which it did intraday on Wednesday, was 2002. I was junior, near a man who kept a yield curve pinned above his monitor and redrew it by hand, badly, and a five percent ten-year was not a story then, it was a Tuesday. The parallel is useless, obviously. In 2002 the fear was that nothing would ever grow again, and the term premium is wide now because people have read the deficit tables and would like to be paid for reading them. I still think about that curve.
Tomorrow the banks: JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS), Wells Fargo (WFC) and Citigroup (C). FactSet has the index penciled in for something near thirty percent earnings growth this quarter, a number that either explains the price or should frighten you. CPI Wednesday at half past eight. Warsh speaks Friday, and since he has stopped submitting projections entirely, the speech is the projection. The IMF sits in Bangkok all week.
I closed Keel Infrastructure (KEEL) on Thursday, down 24% over twelve sessions. The S&P was flat across the same stretch, so none of that is the market's doing. It was a bet that one of three sites would announce a lease, none did, the close on the eighth came in twenty percent under entry, and the stop went off. That exit is automatic rather than a judgement, which is the entire reason it exists. Starter position, sized for this outcome.
Gold is 4,175.60 an ounce as of 4:30 New York time, down 18 dollars. WTI near 90.20 and Brent around 103, both softer on hopes for a Russia-Ukraine energy ceasefire nobody has signed. Bitcoin 83,512, higher on the day and lower on the week. The 10-year is 5.24% from Friday and will still be 5.24% at the close, which makes it the only honest quote on the screen.
Quiet sessions are where positions get taken by people who would rather not be watched. See you tomorrow.
Salomon