Brent is holding near 110 over a shipping lane most of Wall Street could not find on a map, and the Nasdaq spent yesterday buying semiconductors anyway. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Tuesday, October 20, 2026.
Yesterday was a rebound, which is the name we give to a week of selling being forgotten by Monday lunchtime. The S&P closed up about four tenths, the Nasdaq about a percent, the Dow flat to slightly red because it still contains companies that make things. That follows a week in which the S&P lost roughly two percent and the Nasdaq more than four, its worst since June. Nothing was resolved in between. The chips simply stopped going down.
What nobody wants to look at is the producer price index, up 6.3 percent over the year through September while the consumer version ran 3.7. That gap is either a margin squeeze or a pass-through waiting its turn. Brent at 110 is the highest since May. Futures give an October hold something like eighty-five percent and then quietly price December as close to settled, and equities trade as if the second half of that sentence belongs to someone else. The ten-year sits near 5.09, and the only reason anyone calls that calm is that it printed 5.35 this month, the highest since 2002. We have anchored to our own worst week.
Half of this city trades physical crude. Rue du Rhone runs on it, and when Brent moves ten dollars you can read it in the restaurant bookings before the screens. A friend there spent Sunday explaining war risk premiums on hulls to me, which charterers eat the cost, why the freight curve knows things the flat price does not. I followed maybe sixty percent. What I kept was his shrug when I asked whether this ends. He said the Strait has been closing for forty years and has never closed, which is either reassuring or precisely what you hear before the first time.
Housing starts and building permits at half past eight, pending home sales after, numbers that matter enormously to people buying houses and not at all to anyone waiting for Netflix (NFLX) tonight. Netflix is down better than a quarter this year, which makes it the rare large technology company being asked to justify itself with arithmetic. Meta Platforms (META) and Tesla (TSLA) tomorrow. The Fed is quiet until the twenty-eighth, so we have eight more days of imagining what Warsh thinks.
We closed Innodata (INOD) on the fourteenth, down twenty-six percent over fourteen sessions against an S&P that went nowhere, up about three tenths over the same stretch. The close came in at or below twenty percent under our entry and the stop did what a stop does. Automatic rather than a judgement, which was the point. I had a view on the name. The view was wrong, and the exit did not ask for my opinion.
Gold is quiet near 4,135, Brent at 110.02, Bitcoin around 81,636, the ten-year at 5.09 percent. S&P futures flat, Nasdaq futures a few tenths lower, though quotes this morning disagree enough that I would not build on the decimals.
The tape knows about the oil. It has decided the oil is someone else's department.
See you tomorrow.
Salomon