Crude near a hundred dollars a barrel is being filed under geopolitics rather than inflation, one day before a Fed that may confirm a December hike. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Tuesday, October 27, 2026.
Yesterday's close was a fine one if you like your rallies sourced from paperwork. The S&P finished up about seven tenths of a percent and the Nasdaq a little more, on the strength of Anthropic filing an S-1 in which the price range and the share count are both blank. It does disclose roughly sixteen billion of first half revenue, an eighty billion net loss, and some four hundred and forty billion in guaranteed commitments. Tech added most of a percent on that. Overnight the enthusiasm thinned and futures drifted.
Meanwhile crude has sat at six month highs for a week and nobody will say the word inflation out loud. Houthi attacks on Saudi facilities, tankers hit near Hormuz, Brent above a hundred and seventeen last week before easing back on talks in Tehran. All of it gets written up on the geopolitics page, as though the price of a barrel stops being a price when the reason for it involves a drone. The Fed meets today and tomorrow, is expected to do nothing, and futures put roughly eighty percent odds on a hike in December. The ten year sits just under five percent, down from above five and a third earlier this month. Those two facts have not been introduced to each other.
I live in a city where a meaningful share of the world's physical crude changes hands over lunch, and the people doing it are not thinking about Kevin Warsh at all. They think about freight rates and which hull is insurable this week. I had coffee Saturday with one of them who has never read a Fed statement and does not plan to start. In 2022 I spent a long dinner explaining to that same man why energy was a transitory supply shock. He has not forgotten. He brings it up. He also pays for the coffee.
Before the bell there is September durable goods and Case-Shiller, then consumer confidence and new home sales at ten, with the Dallas Fed in the afternoon for anyone still conscious. Coca-Cola (KO), Boeing (BA) and UPS (UPS) report this morning, Visa (V) after the close. With a decision landing tomorrow at two, I would not expect any of it to hold the tape an hour.
No single position in the book earns its own paragraph this morning, which is itself worth reporting. Over the last twenty sessions the Mosaic Mid-Horizon sleeve is down about one and three tenths of a percent, while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) on a total return basis is roughly flat. A point and a bit behind over a month. Nothing in that number requires an explanation from me, and it is not getting one.
Gold near 4,001.86, though quotes differ by ten dollars depending whose screen you believe, WTI 100.60, Bitcoin 79,679, S&P futures 7,706.75, the ten year at 4.98 percent. Bitcoin has spent the year being described as a hedge against precisely this.
Tomorrow they will hold, and the afternoon will go to parsing adverbs. See you then.
Salomon