The inflation report that lands this morning does not contain an inflation rate, and it will decide whether the Fed hikes in December. Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Tuesday, November 10, 2026.
Yesterday was the best session for the S&P since April, up about two and a third percent to just under 7,550, the Dow adding roughly eleven hundred points, the VIX down about a fifth to just under 20. The reason was crude. Trump signalled the Iran war would end "fairly soon," Brent fell almost six percent, and every model that reads oil as inflation bought equities. Same afternoon, Nvidia (NVDA) closed down a bit over four percent and shed close to two hundred billion dollars of market value, after its board opened an investigation into the chief executive's affair with a woman US intelligence believes was passing information to Beijing. The index went up anyway.
The part nobody lingers on is that this rally is running directly into a central bank the market now expects to tighten. December hike odds are above eighty percent. The ten-year sits near 4.86, gold is above four thousand one hundred dollars, and equities just had their best day in seven months. One of those four prices is wrong. I have no idea which.
About the missing number. The BLS did not collect October 2025 prices during last year's shutdown and says it cannot go back and ask, which is fair, nobody remembers what a sandwich cost thirteen months ago. So economists have averaged September and November of last year and produced an unofficial annual rate near 3.9 percent, a figure resting on the assumption that last autumn behaved itself. I keep my own index, badly, in a notebook: the coffee on the rue du Rhone, the tram pass, what the garage charges to tell me nothing is wrong with the car. It is unscientific and useless for policy. It has never had a gap in it.
CPI at half past eight, headline expected around 0.3 percent on the month and core at 0.2. A core print at 0.2 reportedly settles December, so the year comes down to one rounded decimal from an agency with a hole in its own records. Tomorrow the bond market closes for Veterans Day while equities trade, so anyone wanting to reprice the Fed gets a full day to sit with it.
No single position in the book is worth the paragraph this morning, which is itself worth saying. So instead, the Mosaic Mid-Horizon sleeve, which has not been rebalanced since the thirteenth of August. The work still in hand is more Asia exposure and lower fees, and it moves when that is finished rather than when the tape gets loud. Sitting still is not a position I am defending. It is the sleeve doing what it was built for.
Early in New York, spot gold was around 4,114.80, Brent settled at 92.57 yesterday and was softer again overnight, bitcoin near 74,400, S&P futures roughly flat, the ten-year at 4.86. Bitcoin down again, which by now is simply its resting state.
A number arrives at 8:30 that cannot tell you what a year of inflation looked like, and by nine we will all be trading as though it did.
Stay sharp.
Salomon