Treasury Yields Hit 5.3% & Largest Buyback In History – Monthly Market Update Podcast – October 2026

So we can start with some of the performance of the markets this past month.

So September 2026, we definitely saw everything down except for the AI chip companies, essentially.

With a few exceptions, you see SpaceX and Meta, which is Facebook, has two bright green squares here.

And then the only other green square are these semiconductor manufacturers and the semiconductor equipment manufacturers.

So Almost everything else fell for the month.

We saw definitely the top 50 outperforming with that being the up almost 2% versus the S&P 500 falling 0.4%.

GARP, our preferred investing strategy performed poorly this past month.

You can definitely see a lot of banks and lots of smaller companies.

Growth at a reasonable price usually tilts to a smaller side of of the companies uh you see small caps down uh 5.6 percent you see garp down 5.1 5.2 percent so definitely interesting to see how different the market is uh trading at least in the past month uh bonds continue to fall as these interest rates rise bonds prices fall so we see bonds down uh two percent total return two point three seven percent for the month of september Global ex-U.S., these are non-U.S. companies, the stock markets, international stock markets, down slightly less than small caps, U.S. small caps, but more than the S&P 500, down 2.5%.

Gold falling 6.5%, 6.6%.

Crude oil rising a little bit.

Oil usually is pretty volatile.

So a 5% move in a single month isn't anything too crazy.

And Bitcoin up almost 6%, another volatile class.

Anything you see here, Gordon? Well, it's just kind of interesting how for most of the summer, it was a There were gains at all levels in the market, the big companies and the smaller ones.

And what we're seeing now is some more companies making new lows and the advanced decline ratio, which is something that some people look at for kind of a trend.

know it's technical analysis so it's uh you know not fundamental to individual companies or the companies but we're seeing um more companies going down so it's kind of a broad decline maybe that's just a rotation too it's more about people putting money into the chip stocks and just you know that money has to come from somewhere um Also, the interest rate spike is quite notable.

Last week, mortgage rates, 30-year mortgage rates really jumped up a bit.

So I'm sure that's driving a lot of this.

Yeah, banks might be falling at least temporarily with the changes in interest rates.

Higher rates are usually good for banks over the long term if they're sustained, but over the short term, it could be problematic.

And a lot of the semiconductors, I believe one of the moves while they're growing up was Nvidia earnings and Micron earnings, they had continued strong returns versus the expectation was, is the AI spend really sustainable? And at least as of this quarter, it seems like the answer is yes, or at least the fears of it not being sustainable are a few more quarters down.

So I think that might be a lot of the moves into these markets.

uh ai names ai chip name specifically and then meta with uh this kind of uh its own story where it launched its i think muse um ai agent and has gotten itself back into the ai race a lot of the time uh the past year we were talking about how uh meta was spending on par with you know Google and Anthropic and all these other hyperscalers, but didn't have its own AI platform.

So the question was, are they going to rent the compute to other companies or what are they going to do? And it seems like they have at least some product or service that they're going to be trying to compete in, which is use.