Crude fell more than three percent overnight because the President would rather decide about Iran after Tuesday's election than before it. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Monday, November 2, 2026.
Friday was not subtle. The S&P closed down about a percent and three quarters near 7,580, the Nasdaq Composite lost nearly three, and Intel (INTC) fell about twenty-nine percent in one session, its worst day in four decades, after explaining its cash burn. October was the Nasdaq's worst month since March 2025. Futures this morning are up about half a percent.
The overnight move was in oil, back toward a hundred dollars from last week's six-month high, after Trump signaled he would give diplomacy more room and that any decision waits until after the midterms. Iranian and Qatari officials are in a third day of talks. The risk premium in crude is now a polling schedule, which makes every oil trader a political analyst, and every political analyst I have met has been wrong about an election.
ISM manufacturing prints at ten, and the component nobody quotes, prices paid, sat at 77.9 last month. September PCE was 3.6 percent. Crude has spent five weeks at or above a hundred. December is priced around three in four for a hike. And the ten-year is at 4.93, down from five, because money left technology stocks on Friday and had to sleep somewhere. One end of the curve is pricing a growth scare and the other is pricing an inflation problem, and equities have abstained. The argument on the tape is about how fast a GPU depreciates. Nobody is arguing about the barrel.
I keep going back to August 1990. Iraq took Kuwait, crude doubled inside three months, the S&P fell seventeen percent, and the market bottomed on the first night of the air war in January. Everyone drew the lesson that war is a buying opportunity. What I worked out later, at some cost, is that the recession had already begun before the tanks moved and oil got the credit. The parallel does not hold. I cannot find a recession here, and the shooting in this one keeps getting postponed. A reader in Boston wrote last week asking which line of his own profit and loss contains the oil price. I had no answer then and I have none now.
Also today: construction spending, and Apple (AAPL) after the close, the one megacap that can report tonight without being asked to defend a depreciation schedule. Then the election, services Wednesday, payrolls Friday. Nobody reads a manufacturing survey the day before people vote.
The Mosaic Mid-Horizon sleeve has not been rebalanced since the thirteenth of August. Eleven weeks of drift, through a war, a hundred-dollar barrel and the Nasdaq 100's third correction of the year. The pending work is more Asia exposure and lower fees, and it remains pending. I would like to call that patience rather than inertia, and on some mornings I believe it.
Gold is near 3,903 dollars, WTI around 100.90, Bitcoin about 78,350 after a bad Binance week, and the ten-year at 4.93 percent. S&P futures are up roughly four tenths; the exact print depends on which feed you believe, and I trust none of them before nine.
Have a good one.
Salomon