Nasdaq futures lost more than two percent to AI-regulation fear overnight and took most of it back by dawn. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Wednesday, November 4, 2026.
Yesterday's close was the calm part. The S&P finished up about a third of a percent on Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (AVGO), the Nasdaq added most of a percent, and the Dow fell roughly two hundred points because Apple (AAPL) had a bad day and the Dow is a price-weighted museum piece. Then the counting started. Both chambers went to the Democrats, S&P futures dropped more than a percent and Nasdaq-100 futures more than two, and the stated reason was regulatory oversight of artificial intelligence. Around the time the President said he would accept the results, the whole thing reversed. As I write, the futures feeds disagree with each other by about a percent, which is at least honest of them.
So a Congress that will spend two years failing to pass an AI bill moved the most expensive equities on earth by two percent in four hours. Meanwhile, five weeks from now, Kevin Warsh's committee meets with September inflation at three point seven percent, two October dissenters already on record wanting more, and hike odds running somewhere around seventy to seventy-three percent across the venues that take real money. Divided government does not change the price of money. It changes who gets blamed for it.
There is a printout on my desk from January I should have thrown away. Gold at something like fifty-six hundred dollars, with a note in my own handwriting about the hedge finally working. It is near thirty-nine hundred now. Down roughly a third while reported inflation went up, which is not what the brochure said. I have read four explanations and believed none of them. The one I keep returning to is that gold was never pricing inflation. It was pricing the odds that nobody would do anything about it, and somebody is now doing something. That is not a finished thought and I am leaving it where it sits.
ADP private payrolls at eight fifteen, expected near sixty-five thousand against ninety the month before. ISM services at ten, carrying the prices index that printed seventy-four last time and that nobody will quote. Friday brings the October jobs report, which is the only number this week Warsh will actually read.
No single trade earns the paragraph today, which is itself a fact about the month. So the sleeve. Mosaic Mid-Horizon is down about four and a half percent over the last twenty sessions, against the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) at about three and a quarter on a total return basis, measured through Tuesday's close. Behind, in a month where being long almost anything was the error. It is a sleeve. I will not dress it up as a trade.
Gold near 3,923.91 depending on the feed, WTI around 96.55, Bitcoin somewhere between seventy-six and seventy-eight thousand, the ten-year at about 4.95 percent after adding nearly six basis points. S&P futures I decline to quote to two decimals, since they have changed sign twice since I sat down.
A new Congress, the same arithmetic. See you tomorrow.
Salomon