Brent settled above 113 dollars and the ten-year had its largest one-day rally since the week Silicon Valley Bank failed, on the same afternoon. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Friday, October 23, 2026.
Yesterday's close was a tech funeral with decent catering. The S&P gave up about a percent, the Nasdaq about two and a half, and Meta (META) led the procession after printing free cash flow of negative two billion and lifting the floor on this year's capital spending to 135 billion. Revenue grew twenty-six percent. Nobody cared. The line that mattered was the one where the money leaves and does not come back. The market funded that on faith for three years and yesterday asked for a receipt, which in year three is fair.
So money went into Treasuries. The ten-year fell about nineteen basis points, which it has managed on fifteen days in the past decade. I want to be careful here, because the story told about that rally is safety, and the safe thing people bought was a long claim on dollars in a week when Brent hit a five-month high on claimed Houthi strikes against Saudi oil infrastructure and September CPI came in at 3.7 percent. Oil shock, hot inflation, buy duration. Someone will explain this to me eventually.
I spent twenty minutes before seven reading tanker data instead, Kpler's count of eighteen vessels allegedly attacked in two weeks, the sort of thing that moved the whole tape in 1990 and now sits below a capex guide. Everyone reaches for 1990, Brent doubling in three months, the S&P bottoming in October and then running for a decade, and it does not quite fit, because that was a supply shock into a recession and this is a supply shock into the largest construction project in corporate history. I argued about it with a colleague who thinks oil is a one-week story.
Ahead: flash PMIs at 9:45 and the final University of Michigan survey at ten, one-year inflation expectations at 4.7 percent. The Fed meets Tuesday and Wednesday, Warsh having already hiked in September, and the market prices a hold near 85 percent with the live tail being another hike rather than a cut. The BLS has postponed the September jobs report and delayed CPI, so a survey of a few hundred households is now a load-bearing wall. Nobody will care by noon.
No single position in the book earned this paragraph today, which is its own kind of report. So: the Mosaic Mid-Horizon sleeve is down about 2.4 percent over the last twenty sessions, against the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) total return down about 0.4 percent across the same stretch. It lagged. It lagged the way a spread-out sleeve lags a cap-weighted index in a month like this one, and the construction did what the construction is built to do.
This morning gold is around 4,021.41 an ounce, a two-month low, Brent 112.96, WTI 98.12, Bitcoin near 81,705, December S&P futures flat at 7,702.25, the ten-year back around 4.98 percent. Gold falling in a week of war, oil and 3.7 percent inflation is the one I cannot square before coffee.
Yesterday the market hid from a capex bill and an oil war in the same instrument. Have a good one.
Salomon