Wall Street's session on Monday split along sectoral lines, with oil futures pushing to their highest level in roughly two weeks while technology stocks slipped lower, as investors held their positions in check ahead of third-quarter earnings reports and a run of closely followed economic releases due throughout the week.
Oil markets reacted to weekend attacks on Riyadh's international airport, with US crude contracts gaining more than 2% and Brent contracts trading above $106 a barrel. Those strikes weighed on market expectations of a supply boost that had built around Trump's endorsement of renewed Russian diesel flows and his separate discussions with both sides about halting attacks on energy infrastructure.
Three of Wall Street's most-watched banks — Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase — are due to release their quarterly figures starting Tuesday, kicking off an earnings period that investors and analysts will be tracking closely through the week. Third-quarter profit growth across S&P 500 companies was projected to reach 30.6%, based on figures compiled by LSEG IBES. September's figures for consumer prices, producer prices, and retail activity are all scheduled for release within the same stretch of days.
Bond yields hovering near levels not visited in roughly twenty years held stock traders in a watchful stance on Columbus Day, a session where US Treasury activity was suspended for the holiday, with sustained pressure from energy prices viewed as a factor feeding into inflation expectations. Tim Ghriskey, a portfolio strategist at New York-based Ingalls & Snyder, pointed to a set of closely tracked economic data releases scheduled to arrive later that week. Bond markets offered little guidance, leaving investors in a holding pattern, while Ghriskey noted that upcoming earnings reports were also being closely watched. He noted that the quartet of banks scheduled to release earnings on Tuesday carried the potential to move markets noticeably.
By 2:16 p.m. ET (1816 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average had added 175.51 points — a gain of 0.34% — to reach 51,830.46, while the S&P 500 slipped 10.51 points (0.13%) to settle at 7,801.03 and the Nasdaq Composite shed 126.08 points, or 0.46%, landing at 27,240.09.
A climb in crude prices lifted the energy sector to the top of the S&P 500's 11 industry groupings, where it posted a 1.4% advance. Communication services within the S&P 500 recorded the second-largest gain of the session, climbing 1.3%, driven in part by Meta's roughly 4% rise. Of the eleven market sectors tracked, nine posted gains while only technology and consumer discretionary finished the session with losses.
Among sector moves, chip-related equities led a pullback that left technology shares off by around 1%. Chipmaker stocks, as tracked by the Philadelphia semiconductor index, gave back 2.6% on the session after the gauge touched its lowest point in three weeks. Shares in the consumer discretionary sector edged 0.6% lower.
Shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill fell around 5% after Starbucks announced it had no plans to acquire the restaurant chain. Shares in Microsoft edged higher by 0.9%, with a plan to roll out proprietary AI chips pushing the company's total market value past the $4 trillion threshold for the first time in roughly a year. Shares of Salesforce edged up 1.3% after BofA Global Research lifted its rating on the stock from "underperform" to "buy," while eBay posted a gain of more than 4% following Morgan Stanley's decision to place the stock among its top picks.
Beth Hammack, who leads the Cleveland Federal Reserve, put forward the view on Monday that policymakers ought to tighten their stance on borrowing costs at a brisk pace, pointing to inflation that she described as having spread across a wider range of the economy and begun shaping how businesses approach their own pricing decisions. Derivative markets are currently placing the probability of a Federal Reserve rate increase this month at roughly one-in-five, based on data drawn from CME's FedWatch tool.
On the NYSE, gainers held a narrow edge over losers at roughly 1.01 to 1, while 122 stocks notched fresh 52-week peaks against 214 touching new lows. Across Nasdaq-listed names, sellers held the upper hand — 2,828 issues finished lower against 1,866 that managed gains, putting the decline-to-advance ratio at roughly 1.52 to one. Among S&P 500 constituents, ten names touched fresh 52-week peaks against five that fell to new annual lows, whereas the Nasdaq Composite's breadth picture was considerably more skewed, with 47 issues reaching year-long highs and 277 dropping to year-long lows.
