Korean memory stocks lost ten percent overnight on a cell design nobody outside Hefei has seen, and S&P futures are still sitting a few points under a record. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Tuesday, October 13, 2026.
Yesterday's close was almost nothing. The S&P off a hair at 7,807, the Dow up about four-tenths, the Nasdaq down about the same, Micron (MU) off nearly four percent and Sandisk (SNDK) worse. Then Asia opened and did the thing properly. The Kospi fell around six percent and tripped a program-trading halt, SK Hynix lost roughly a tenth of itself, Samsung seven, all on a report that CXMT in Hefei has made progress on a competing memory cell. Not a product. Progress.
Before the bell, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) at seven, Goldman Sachs (GS) at seven-thirty, Citigroup (C) and Wells Fargo (WFC) in the same half hour, which ensures nobody reads any of them. The KBW bank index is down about thirteen percent from its August high. That is the quiet part. The institutions that fund the index have bled since summer, and the reason is the bond book, same as 2023.
Gold is the thing nobody is looking at. It sits about a quarter below where it traded in January. A quarter. Tankers are being hit in the Strait of Hormuz, Brent is north of a hundred and five, Washington announced an energy ceasefire Sunday that Kyiv says Moscow broke by Monday, and the Fed's own projections do not have inflation back at target until 2029. Under those conditions the oldest fear asset on earth is having a worse year than anything in the index, and I have no clean explanation. Central banks were the marginal buyer for two years. I assume they stopped.
I spent part of Sunday arguing with a colleague about whether memory is a commodity, which is what October in Geneva is for. His position is that it never stopped being one. Mine was that three surviving producers made it look like something else for a decade. Qimonda went under in 2009 when DRAM fell below cash cost, Elpida followed in 2012, and the lesson drawn was that the survivors had an oligopoly forever. The parallel only half holds. Qimonda had creditors. Hefei has a state.
Ahead: small business optimism at six, existing home sales at ten, and Waller, Barkin and Collins speaking. None of it will register. September CPI lands tomorrow and the week has already decided to wait.
On the book, Keel Infrastructure (KEEL) is closed. Twelve sessions, out on the eighth, down about twenty-four percent while the S&P did essentially nothing over the same stretch. The close was twenty percent under our entry, and that exit is automatic rather than a judgement, which is the only comfortable thing about it. The position was a bet on a signature, a data center lease at one of three sites with grid capacity. None arrived.
Levels: gold 4,196.17, Brent 105.86, S&P futures 7,856.25, the 10-year back under 5.20 after the long weekend, and Bitcoin somewhere near 84,000, though this morning's quotes disagree by two thousand dollars.
The index is at a record and the two assets that were supposed to warn you are the ones nobody will quote back. Have a good one.
Salomon