What Happened Yesterday
Monday, October 19, 2026
The 30-second version: big tech and chip stocks bounced back after a rough week, so the headline numbers went up. But most regular companies actually fell. If your 401(k) is a plain S&P 500 fund, it ended the day a little ahead. Today brings earnings from GM, 3M, and Netflix, plus SpaceX reports tonight.
Market | Close | Move | Mood |
|---|---|---|---|
S&P 500 | 7,690.73 | +0.41% | Got carried upstairs |
Nasdaq Composite | 26,430.89 | +1.11% | Back from the dead, sort of |
Dow Jones | 51,966.03 | -0.07% (-36 pts) | Showed up, did nothing |
SOX (chip index) | 11,316.34 | +1.61% | Finally won one |
VIX (fear gauge) | 18.44 | -7.8% | Calmer |
Small companies (fund: IWM) | $271.28 | +0.31% | Polite |
Gold (fund: GLD) | $379.69 | -0.61% | Napping |
Oil (fund: USO) | $160.81 | -0.59% | Took a breather |
10-year Treasury yield | 5.15% | up from 5.09% | Creeping |
Bitcoin | ~$81,850 | -0.2% | Present, as usual |
The three rows marked "fund" (small companies, gold, and oil) are funds you can buy like a single stock, not the markets themselves. For those rows, watch the move, not the price. The price is just what one share of the fund costs.
The $1,000 test: $1,000 in the S&P 500 at Friday's close was worth about $1,004 on Monday. In the Nasdaq: about $1,011. In a fund that gives every S&P company an equal vote, about $997.
The index went up
The neighborhood did not
Here's a weird one. The S&P 500 rose 0.4%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 1.1%. Sounds like a good day. Then you look inside, and nearly two-thirds of the companies in the S&P 500 fell, per Yahoo Finance.
How? The S&P 500 is weighted by size, so a few giant companies count for way more than hundreds of normal ones. Amazon alone jumped 5% after Morgan Stanley named it a top pick. Tesla climbed 3.8% two days before its earnings. That was enough to drag the whole index up the stairs, kicking and screaming.
This is moving day, where two of your friends carry the couch, and the other eight hold the door and eat pizza. The couch made it upstairs. Technically, "everyone helped move." But when only two people are lifting, one slips and the whole couch comes back down the stairs.
The chip stocks finally won a day
The SOX, a basket of 30 big chip stocks, rose 1.6% Monday. That snapped eight straight losing days. By our count of the index's history, that's the longest losing streak since 2008, when the economy was actively on fire.
Memory-chip maker Micron gained 3.0%. AMD and Broadcom each rose about 1.8%. NVIDIA added 1.4%.
Don't get excited yet. The chip index is still down about 14% since October 6. One good day doesn't undo eight bad ones.
Last week's selloff was about whether AI companies can keep borrowing huge sums while interest rates climb. Nothing about that changed over the weekend. What changed is that stocks got cheap enough for bargain hunters to wander in. That's a sale, not a cure. Asia's chip stocks agreed overnight (see below).
CoreWeave got an upgrade and still went down
Not everybody got invited back. CoreWeave rents out computing power for AI and pays for its data centers mostly with borrowed money. It's become the poster child for "maybe the AI boom has a debt problem."
Monday morning, Goldman Sachs upgraded the stock to a buy. It rose as much as 7%. Then it gave all of it back and closed down 0.4% at $61.12. That is just 30 cents above its lowest close of the year, $60.82 on July 29.
The worry is spreading to the money behind the boom. Per Bloomberg, the price of insurance against SoftBank not paying its debts hit its highest level in nearly four years on Tuesday (Tokyo time). SoftBank is one of the biggest bankrollers of AI, and its stock is down more than 40% from its June high.
When a big bank says "buy," and the stock goes down anyway, the market is telling you it doesn't care about opinions right now. It wants receipts. CoreWeave's problem is its debt, and a nice note from Goldman doesn't pay off a single loan.
Quick hits
3M made a deal with Amazon after the bell, meaning after the stock market closed at 3:00 PM CT. Amazon got the right to buy up to about 3.2 million 3M shares at $164.89 each, roughly $521 million worth, over seven years. Most of it only unlocks as Amazon buys up to $6 billion of 3M's data center products. 3M stock fell 1.7% during the regular day, then jumped 5.4% to $170.80 after hours (trading that happens after the official close), per Benzinga. The company that makes Post-it notes is now an AI stock. Naturally.
Interest rates crept up. The 10-year Treasury yield, which steers mortgage and car-loan rates, rose to 5.15% from 5.09% Friday, per the Treasury Department. Not a crisis. Just not helping.
Asia didn't buy the rebound. South Korea's main index, the Kospi, closed down 3.7% Tuesday, led by chip giants Samsung and SK Hynix, on fresh worries about whether all that AI spending pays off.
What to Watch Today
Tuesday, October 20. Times are Central.
Time (CT) | What | Why you care |
|---|---|---|
Before the open (before trading starts at 8:30 AM) | Earnings from GM, GE Aerospace, 3M, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Halliburton | Cars, jet engines, defense, and oil services. The "real economy" gets a word in. |
7:30 AM (already out) | Housing starts and building permits (September) | New homes started fell to a pace of 1.22 million a year, down 5.2% from a revised August and below the roughly 1.3 million forecasters expected (Census Bureau). |
9:00 AM | Pending home sales (September) | Homes under contract, not yet sold. Our data provider, EODHD, forecasts a 0.5% dip from August. |
After the close (trading ends at 3:00 PM), about 3:01 PM | Netflix earnings | Plus Capital One, United Airlines, and Intuitive Surgical. |
After the close, call at 3:30 PM | SpaceX earnings | Yes, the rocket company is public now and has to show its homework. |
The Fed: officials are in their quiet period before next week's meeting, so no speeches. The decision lands on Wednesday, October 28, at 1:00 PM CT. The current target range is 3.75% to 4.00%.
Overnight: U.S. stock futures, which are bets on where the index opens, were roughly flat to slightly higher. Asia was a mess (see the Kospi above).
Coming Wednesday: Meta, Tesla, and IBM all report after the close. This is the week Big Tech has to explain where all the money went.
The one thing that could ruin everyone's day: Netflix and SpaceX tonight, then Meta and Tesla tomorrow. Monday's rally was carried by a few giants. If one of them drops the couch, there's nobody else holding it.
Bottom line: the couch made it upstairs on Monday. Two people did the lifting, and everybody's name is on the moving-day group text.
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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. We are a newsletter with opinions and a spreadsheet. Do your own homework, and maybe don't judge a moving crew by who's standing next to the couch.