Sunny Wednesday. Then the Forecast Changed Overnight.

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

The 30-second version: stocks had a good day on Wednesday, led by SpaceX and chip companies, and your S&P 500 fund gained about half a percent. Overnight, the mood flipped: oil jumped past $110 after a deadly drone strike in Saudi Arabia and Iranian reports of tanker fires, Tesla fell after its report, and stock futures (bets on where the market opens) pointed lower. Your 401(k) may give some of Wednesday back today.

Small caps, gold, and oil are funds (IWM, GLD, USO). For those rows, watch the move, not the price. The price is just what one share of the fund costs. SOX is a basket of 30 big chip stocks. The VIX is Wall Street's fear gauge.

The $1,000 test: $1,000 in the S&P 500 at Tuesday's close was worth about $1,006 on Wednesday. In the Nasdaq: about $1,010.

SpaceX stock jumped 7.8% to $159.31 Wednesday, the first session after Tuesday night's results. The rocket company reported a bigger summer profit than analysts expected (AP), and investors acted like they'd seen the sun for the first time in a week.

The warm front spread. Chip stocks, the ones that got soaked last week, rose about 2% as a group. NVIDIA gained 2.5%, AMD 3.4%. Server maker Super Micro rose 9.6% after its own report. Even Tesla climbed 3.4% before its report, because merger talk with SpaceX makes Tesla shareholders feel like they own a piece of the weather.

The fear gauge dropped to 16.7, its third straight decline. In plain English: nobody was carrying an umbrella.

Netflix fell 5.3% to $65.04. The company's quarter was fine: revenue of $12.87 billion, right where analysts expected, per StockStory. The problem was the forecast.

Netflix cut its 2026 advertising sales goal to about $2.7 billion from about $3 billion, blaming the slow rollout of its ad tools. Its revenue forecast for the last three months of the year, $13.44 billion, came in a bit under the $13.51 billion analysts wanted. Small miss. Big shrug from the market.

"After the close" means after regular trading ends at 3:00 PM CT, when big companies like to drop their numbers.

Meta reported revenue of $64.6 billion, above the roughly $63.4 billion analysts expected (StockStory, Benzinga). It forecast $73 billion to $76 billion for the holiday quarter. It also raised its full-year spending forecast to $175 billion to $179 billion, which includes a $9.9 billion legal charge from its August settlement with state attorneys general over kids' safety. And it plans to hand shareholders a new class of stock with no voting rights, so it can raise money for AI while Mark Zuckerberg keeps control. Investors liked it: shares rose 2.2% to $712.65 in after-hours trading (trading after the official close), per Benzinga.

Tesla went the other way. It cut this year's spending plan to $20 billion from $25 billion, per Yahoo Finance, partly because its Optimus robots need more training. Musk compared them to toddlers. It also set a lower long-term goal of 5 million cars a year by the end of the decade (Investing.com). By early Thursday, Tesla was down 5.3% to $365.99 before the official open, per Yahoo Finance's quote at 4:22 AM CT.

And the merger? Bloomberg reports SpaceX and Tesla are aiming to announce a deal in the first half of 2027. Reuters says some insiders are worried about regulators. Nothing has been agreed. It's a forecast, not the weather.

Three things hit while you slept.

A drone strike in Saudi Arabia. A Houthi drone strike near Saudi Aramco's Shaybah oil field killed two people and injured two, according to Saudi state media and The National. Shaybah pumps about 1 million barrels of oil a day. Operations were not affected.

Tanker fires near Iran. Iran's state TV says seven oil tankers were set on fire or damaged in the Strait of Hormuz overnight. That's Iran's claim. The British military's shipping monitor had not reported it as of AP's latest story. If true, it would be the most ships damaged there in one day since the war started in February.

Oil jumped. Brent crude, the global benchmark, traded above $110 a barrel Thursday morning, per multiple reports.

Asia took it badly. South Korea's Kospi closed down 3.5%, led by memory chip makers. Japan and Hong Kong fell too.

U.S. stock futures were down about 0.9% for both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 as of about 4:45 AM CT, per Yahoo Finance.

Valero is the one to watch. Analysts expect the refiner to earn about $21.23 to $21.28 a share, depending on whose forecast you read, versus $3.66 a year ago. That's what a war does for the company, turning crude into gasoline. If you've filled up lately, you've already paid for part of it.

Also: Anthropic, the AI company, could publicly file for its IPO (its first sale of stock to the public) as soon as Friday, Yahoo Finance reports, citing people familiar with the plans. Could. Not has.

The Fed: officials are in their quiet period, so no speeches. The rate decision lands next Wednesday, October 28, at 1:00 PM CT. The current target range is 3.75% to 4.00%.

The one thing that could ruin everyone's day: the tanker report. If anyone besides Iran confirms seven ships hit in a single night, oil's move this morning stops being a scare and starts being a supply problem. And higher oil means higher prices everywhere, which is the last thing a Fed meeting next week needs to see.

Bottom line: Wednesday was a beach day. Thursday checked the radar. Bring a jacket.

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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 plan your retirement around one sunny afternoon.