Crude fell eight percent Monday because peace talks were working, then the US struck an island in the Strait of Hormuz overnight and Brent moved forty cents.
Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
Yesterday's close was the S&P's third loss running, down about half a percent to near 7,541, its lowest since the last day of July. The Nasdaq Composite gave up about a percent with Oracle (ORCL) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) doing most of the damage, after being up more than a percent by late morning. The Dow rose about four tenths, holding less technology than the others on the day oil collapsed.
Then the bell rang. Apple (AAPL) reported $114.5 billion of revenue, up twelve percent, and guided December-quarter gross margin to between 45 and 46 percent against 46.3 expected. The reason given was higher memory costs and the expense of ramping Siri. First quarter reported under Ternus, and the stock fell on it. The interesting part is where that margin went. Memory is being bid away from phones by data centers, which means the AI build-out has started arriving as a cost line at a company building none of it. A month of argument about how fast a GPU depreciates, and the first clean number lands in Cupertino, in a sentence about DRAM.
There was a sheet on the Geneva desk in the nineties, kept by a man who priced franc options and believed in almost nothing, matching American election outcomes against the next twelve months in the index. Split government, up. Unified government, also up. Nothing in it survived contact with a regression and he maintained it for twenty years anyway. I thought of it because in September I told a client the midterms would be the year's biggest macro event. I have stopped saying that. A barrel took the job, and the barrel does not poll.
Ahead of us, September job openings at ten, consensus near 7.1 million against 7.08 prior, with factory orders and revised durable goods behind it. Nobody reads a September vacancy survey on the day people vote. AMD reports after the close, the only scheduled thing today that can move anything. Services Wednesday, payrolls Friday, and a Senate map that will not change the price of a barrel either way.
No position did anything yesterday worth your time, which on a tape waiting for a vote count is roughly what you would expect. So the sleeve. Mosaic Mid-Horizon is down about 2.3 percent over the last five sessions through yesterday's close, against roughly 1.7 percent for the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), total return. Six tenths of a percent behind the index over a week.
Gold is near 3,926.52 dollars, Brent 105.38, Bitcoin about 76,663, S&P futures 7,564.75, the ten-year at 4.90 percent. Almost $400 million left the spot Bitcoin funds on Monday after $643 million the Friday before, which is a quiet way to leave a room.
Peace got priced on Monday, the strikes carried on overnight, and the curve settled the argument at forty cents.
Vote if you can, and ignore the first hour.
Salomon