A month of giveback
Wall Street closed October with a sharp sell-off and a monthly loss for the two main technology-heavy indexes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 572 points, or 1.09%, to 51,770 on Friday. The Nasdaq Composite dropped about 2.5% and the S&P 500 lost 1.3%. For the month the Dow added 1.5%, while the Nasdaq fell 5.2% — its worst month since March 2025 — and the S&P 500 slipped 1.2%.
The trigger was earnings rather than a single data release. Several large technology companies reported results that did not match the spending plans announced alongside them, and investors began to reassess how much of the artificial intelligence boom is already reflected in prices.
Intel's worst session in four decades
Intel had its steepest one-day decline in more than 40 years. The selling spread through chip suppliers and data-centre equipment makers, and the Nasdaq 100 briefly crossed the threshold of a technical correction, a 10% fall from its high. The group of seven megacap companies that carried the index for most of the year accounted for a large share of the damage.
Other markets added to the unease. Bitcoin fell after Binance disclosed a $6.3 billion hack, the largest theft of its kind. Two Federal Reserve officials said in separate remarks that rates may need to be higher, pushing back on the idea of near-term cuts.
What investors are watching
The question now is whether this is a rotation or the start of a longer de-rating. Capital spending guidance from the largest cloud companies remains enormous, and the memory and power constraints behind it are real. But the market has started to separate companies that can show revenue from AI from those that can only show plans. With the midterm election on Tuesday and another round of earnings due, traders expect volatility to stay elevated through the first week of November.