Weekly Market Update for October 30, 2026

by Gavyn Jensen-Schneider, Research Associate

It’s been another exciting-but-tough week for technology names. The S&P 500 finished the week down -0.57%, while the Nasdaq fell -2.00%. The 10-Year Treasury yield, an interest rate indicator, closed at 4.93%, down -6 basis points (bps) from last week. The 6-Month US Treasury, a favorite of our US Treasury strategy, closed at 4.27%, down -4 bps from last week.

The final week of October began with some fanfare as Anthropic, the creator of frontier AI model Claude, publicly filed its S-1, a key step toward an initial public offering (IPO). Anthropic, which would go public under the ticker ANT, is reportedly targeting a mid-November IPO, with a valuation target between $1.5 and $2 trillion, the first standalone frontier model maker to go public. At the time of filing its S-1, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 was the most powerful AI model available, according to Artificial Analysis, though Google’s Gemini 4 Carbon took the pole position upon its release this week.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, got slugged by the market after its Q3 earnings report, falling 12.6% on Thursday in its single biggest drop since going public in 2004. Much of the negative sentiment centers on a $1.6 billion miss in Google Search revenue. Some analysts see this as a sign of AI disruption: as more people start supplanting Google search with AI search tools, it may become harder to sell ad space. It’s not all doom and gloom for Alphabet, though, as Google Cloud continues to expand at breakneck speed. Revenue of $30.7 billion topped Wall Street estimates by $1.9 billion while growing +103% y/y.

The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady at its Wednesday meeting, as expected, in a 10-2 decision. The FOMC’s reasoning, as recounted by Chairman Warsh, was simple: the committee wanted more data. The 6-week timeframe between meetings meant little new data had come in between the September and October meetings. Before the December meeting, the committee will get a slew of new data including two readings of Q3 GDP, two employment reports (October and November), two PCE inflation reports (September and October), and an additional CPI inflation report (October), which should provide ample information for the committee’s next decision.

The earnings spotlight shines next week on semiconductors, with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Arm Holdings (ARM), and Qualcomm (QCOM) all set to report. The beginning of a new month comes with a fresh slate of labor market indicators: the September Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS); the October employment report including nonfarm payrolls and the unemployment rate; and the preliminary November reading of the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index.