Global Monthly Equities Report - October 2026

Executive Summary

Reporting period: 1 – 30 October 2026.

October was the month the artificial-intelligence trade broke and everything else worked. The S&P 500 fell 0.93% to 7,580.07 and the Nasdaq 5.30% to 25,437.00, but the equal-weighted S&P 500 rose 4.95% and nine of eleven sectors finished higher. Energy gained 13.85%, Consumer Staples 10.73% and Utilities 10.11%, while Communication Services fell 10.12% and Information Technology 8.29%. More than two trillion dollars of Nasdaq-100 market value was erased inside the month. The dispersion was the exact mirror of September, when the cap-weighted index fell 0.45% and the average stock fell 5.18%.

The selling was a verdict on capital expenditure, not on earnings. Meta fell roughly 9% on record revenue in the week to 23 October after committing to spending the market would not fund. On 30 October Amazon and Alphabet both missed, Amazon holding its 2026 capital-expenditure forecast at 220 billion dollars while reporting negative free cash flow of 42.4 billion, and Intel guided the fourth quarter down after beating. The S&P 500 fell 1.82% that day and the Nasdaq 2.86%, closing the month 7.8% below its 6 October high. Every company punished in October was punished for spending, and every company rewarded was rewarded for not needing to.

Policy moved the other way and the curve rallied hard. The Federal Open Market Committee held at 3.75–4.00% on 28 October by ten votes to two, with Beth Hammack and Lisa Cook dissenting in favour of a further increase. The two-year fell 32 basis points over the month to 4.56%, the ten-year 35 to 4.94% and the thirty-year 33 to 5.31% — a second parallel shift, in the opposite direction to September's. The forward equity risk premium turned positive this month, a 5.02% forward earnings yield against a 4.94% ten-year, after minus 36 basis points at the start of the month.