Meta holds up a flat market as the 30-year yield hits a 2004 high
Meta and Intel kept the S&P 500 flat while 57 of 100 names we track fell. Oracle and Arm slid, long yields rose again, and oil eased overnight.
The index looked calm on Thursday and the market underneath it did not. The S&P 500 finished almost exactly flat because Meta and a handful of chip stocks rose, while most of the stocks we track fell and the 30-year Treasury yield climbed to its highest level since 2004.
A flat index, a weak majority
In our feed, the S&P 500 fund SPY fell 0.08% to $767.18 and the Nasdaq-100 fund QQQ fell 0.01%. The Dow fund DIA lost 0.31%, and the Dow itself fell about 162 points, per TheStreet, its third straight daily loss.
Breadth tells a different story from the index. 57 of the 100 stocks and funds we track fell and 43 rose. A few very large companies did the lifting. Meta Platforms (META) rose 4.50% to $777.59, Alphabet (GOOGL) 1.34%, AMD 2.38% and Intel (INTC) 3.91% to $127.39.
Meta’s gain followed its Connect event, where Mark Zuckerberg showed new hardware built around its Muse AI agent and said Muse would take a small fee from transactions, per Yahoo Finance. That gave investors a first sketch of how the agent might earn money. Intel has been rising for weeks on demand for server chips; 24/7 Wall St. counted a 30% gain in the month to Wednesday.
The AI trade split in two
Not every AI name went up. Oracle (ORCL) fell 3.47% to $139.54 after Bloomberg reported that it had sent a “force majeure” notice to Stack Infrastructure, the developer of Project Jupiter, a New Mexico data center that could cost up to $165 billion and supports the Stargate computing build-out for OpenAI. A force majeure notice is a contract clause that can excuse a party from its obligations when something outside its control gets in the way. Oracle said the project “remains on our planned schedule,” per the Albuquerque Journal.
Arm Holdings (ARM) fell 7.88% to $306.34, the worst move in our feed. Coverage we found tied it partly to Oracle’s news and partly to profit-taking after a strong run. Other names tied to AI spending also fell: ServiceNow (NOW) lost 2.13%, IBM 2.45% and Broadcom (AVGO) 1.30%.
Put together, the market treated the companies selling AI to consumers and supplying its chips differently from the companies whose results depend on huge data-center projects getting built on time.
Yields kept climbing
The 30-year Treasury yield touched about 5.44%, its highest since 2004, and the 10-year yield hovered between 5.10% and 5.14%, near its highest level since 2007, per Yahoo Finance and The Motley Fool. The long-bond fund TLT fell 1.29% in our feed.
Higher yields hit a group that usually holds up on bad days: household-name consumer staples. Walmart (WMT) fell 2.66%, PepsiCo (PEP) 1.56%, Procter & Gamble (PG) 1.16% and Costco (COST) 0.91%. Investors often own these for steady income, and a Treasury bond paying more than 5% competes directly with that. Real estate and utilities fell for the same reason: American Tower (AMT) lost 2.06% and NextEra Energy (NEE) 1.82%. UPS fell 3.93%, the second-worst move in our feed, extending a slide after Bank of America cut its view on the stock on September 21.
Oil added to the pressure. Brent crude rose 3.21% to $106.39 a barrel on Thursday, per Trading Economics. Stocks pared losses later in the day after Reuters reported that US and Iranian negotiators were working on a phased deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, per Yahoo Finance. That deal is reported, not confirmed.
A few groups rose. Card and payments companies had a good day: Visa (V) gained 1.79%, Mastercard (MA) 1.10%, American Express (AXP) 1.23% and Affirm (AFRM) 5.11%, the best move in our feed. We did not find a single story that explains the group move.
Trade talks and earnings after the close
President Trump and Xi Jinping extended their trade truce by two months past its November 10 expiration, short of the three-year extension China had proposed, per The Motley Fool and Charles Schwab. They also discussed a notification system for AI incidents that could affect national security.
Weekly jobless claims fell by 1,000 to 197,000, per Yahoo Finance, another sign the job market is holding up. Like Wednesday’s strong business-activity data, that is good for the economy and awkward for anyone hoping the Fed stops raising rates.
Costco reported fiscal fourth-quarter results after the close. Net sales rose 11.2% to $93.9 billion and earnings were $6.75 a share, against $5.87 a year earlier, per the company’s release. Comparable sales rose 9.4%. The quarter included a one-time benefit of $0.15 a share from tariff refunds, so part of the jump will not repeat. In after-hours trading, our feed had Costco at $898.12, slightly above its close.
This morning
European stocks rose as oil eased. The STOXX 600 was up 0.7% early on Friday and on course for its first weekly gain after three weekly losses, per Reuters via Investing.com. Brent was down 0.38% and US crude 1.04% at that point. Airline shares rose on cheaper fuel, and energy shares fell.
US stock futures were little changed early Friday, per CNBC, with the Dow on track for a fourth straight losing week. In after-hours trading, our feed had Meta at $776.00, Oracle at $139.79 and Arm at $309.09, all close to Thursday’s closing prices.
What to watch today
- Durable goods orders for August, 8:30 a.m. ET.
- The final University of Michigan consumer sentiment reading for September, 10:00 a.m. ET. The preliminary reading was 47.8, the second-lowest on record, per Kiplinger.
- Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid is scheduled to speak.
- The Baker Hughes US oil rig count, 1:00 p.m. ET.
- Whether the 30-year yield holds above 5.4%, and any confirmation of the reported US-Iran talks on the Strait of Hormuz.
- Micron reports results on September 30 after the close.
Not financial advice. iTrading Buddy summarizes publicly available market data and news; every figure above is sourced from the reporting available before the US open on the date shown. Verify anything you act on.