Wall Street spent Wednesday celebrating the midterms and Thursday panicking about them, and the ballots did not change in between. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Friday, November 6th.
Yesterday the S&P gave up about four and a half percent, the Nasdaq five and a half, and the chip index something like twelve, its second worst session on record. Nvidia (NVDA) fell about nine percent and shed roughly 450 billion dollars of market value, a number large enough that it stops meaning anything. Qualcomm (QCOM) guided badly. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) lost thirteen. The story attached to all of it is that a Democratic House and Senate make data centers harder to build, which Meta's president said more or less out loud, and Bernie Sanders has asked for a national moratorium. Wednesday the Dow had its best day since April of 2025 on those same results. Somebody read the platform on Thursday morning.
Here is the part that will not survive contact with December. Odds on a December hike slid to around sixty-six percent by last night's close, from near eighty-two after the vote. They fell because equities fell. The committee held at 3.75 to 4.00 on the twenty-eighth with two members voting for more, and inflation is near three and a half against a two percent target. A committee in that position does not soften because semiconductors had a bad Thursday, and the tape is quietly assuming it will.
Crude did something genuinely interesting and nobody had the attention span for it. Both benchmarks are down roughly twelve percent on the week, flattened early on hopes of Iran de-escalation, then bid back over two sessions on fresh attacks on ships near Hormuz. Brent is at the door of a hundred again. I walk past the commodity houses on the Quai most mornings, and the oil desks have a particular expression when Hormuz is in the headlines, the expression of people who have watched this film since the tanker war of 1987 and stopped guessing which reel it is. Twelve percent in the one input that matters most to the inflation the Fed claims to be fighting. It did not make the front of anything.
Payrolls at half past eight, consensus around sixty to sixty-five thousand after September's twenty-nine, unemployment expected to hold at 4.2. A weak print will be called dovish, a strong one hawkish, and either way the afternoon gets spent arguing about Nvidia.
No single trade is worth this paragraph today, which is itself worth saying. So the sleeve instead. Mosaic Mid-Horizon last moved on the thirteenth of August. Eleven positions, nothing touched since, through October and through yesterday. The note still sitting on the file reads "still rebalancing for more Asia exposure and lower fees," and has read that way for weeks, which is either patience or procrastination and I am no longer sure which. It moves when it moves.
Quotes are scattered, so hold these loosely. Gold around 4,087.40, WTI near 91.38, bitcoin about 76,080 after a billion and change in liquidations, S&P futures around 7,408.50, the ten year at 4.84 percent. Bitcoin fell with the Nasdaq again, which is a strange career for a hedge.
A story can be bullish and fatal inside thirty hours. Have a good one.
Salomon