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Showing posts from September, 2026

The S&P 500 Enters Q4 Up 11.8% for the Year. Here's What Happened the Last 21 Times It Was Up 10-20% Through September

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Correction (November 1, 2026): An earlier version of this article said the S&P 500 closed September 2026 at 7,690.96, up roughly 14.6% for the year, citing index data compiled by Trading Economics. The index closed at 7,651.54 on September 30, 2026 against a 2025 year-end close of 6,845.50 -- a gain of 11.8%. The figure and its attribution have been corrected to the S&P 500 daily close series published by S&P Dow Jones Indices and distributed by FRED. 2026 still falls inside the 10%-20% band this article studies, but in the lower part of it rather than the middle. The S&P 500 closed out September 2026 at 7,651.54, up roughly 11.8% for the year, according to the S&P 500 daily close series published by S&P Dow Jones Indices and distributed by FRED, as of September 30, 2026. That figure matters less on its own than what it sets up: the index is entering the fourth quarter, historically the strongest quarter of the year, already up double digits. That is not a new...
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The Fed's First Hike in Three Years Opened a Historically Rough 90-Day Window for Stocks — Here's Where Day 13 Stands

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Correction November 1, 2026: this article previously attributed to the FOMC statement a phrase calling the move "the official start of a tightening cycle." The September 16, 2026 statement contains no such language and gave no guidance on further moves. The year-to-date gain, given as roughly 13%, was about 12% as of September 29, 2026. Sources: Federal Reserve FOMC statement, September 16, 2026; FRED series SP500. This cycle has a clock on it. The Federal Reserve cut in December 2025, held through the first nine months of 2026, then raised rates on September 16 — and the six previous hiking cycles since 1994 all have a shape that is measured in days and months from that first increase rather than in headlines. What follows walks that clock in order: the nine months before the hike, the hike itself, what day 0 has meant historically, where day 13 sits, the stretch from roughly day 30 to day 105 that the record keeps pointing at, and what the one-year mark has looked like. ...
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The Yield Curve Un-Inverted 25 Months Ago. Here's What Happened After Every Prior Un-Inversion Since 1978

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Correction October 31, 2026: The current episode’s permanent un-inversion date is corrected from August 27, 2024 to September 6, 2024 — after the first crossing on August 27 the spread dipped back to -0.04 on September 3 and -0.02 on September 5, 2024, and only then stayed non-negative — so the 2022-24 inverted stretch runs about 26 months, not 25. The 1978-80 low is corrected from -2.28 to -2.41 points, reached on March 20, 1980. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), series T10Y2Y, daily. The gap between the 10-year and 2-year Treasury yield has closed at zero or above on every trading day for nearly 25 months now, its last negative close having been September 5, 2024. That "un-inversion" gets far less attention than the inversion that preceded it, but a look at the four comparable episodes since 1978 shows the un-inversion date, not the inversion itself, is the marker analysts have historically watched most closely. This piece lays out when each prior u...
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S&P 500 Equity Risk Premium Turns Negative Again: A 36-Year History Shows This Has Happened Three Times Before, With Opposite Results

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Correction October 31, 2026: the headline and opening line were corrected from two prior negative episodes to three. The article itself documents 1990, 2000 and 2009, so the current reading is the fourth, and the 2004 to 2023 positive stretch now notes the 2009 exception. Source: U.S. Treasury daily par yield curve and multpl.com S and P 500 series, as cited at the end of this article. As of the close on Monday, September 21, 2026, the S&P 500 traded at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 26.48, according to data compiled by Robert Shiller and S&P and published by multpl.com . Invert that and you get an earnings yield of 3.78%. On the same day, the 10-year U.S. Treasury note yielded 4.96%, confirmed directly from the U.S. Treasury's daily par yield curve rates . All index levels, yields and dollar figures in this article are quoted in U.S. dollars and reflect the composite close of U.S. exchange trading for the S&P 500 index (not any single constituent stock), as rep...
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The Shiller CAPE Hit 40.9: What Followed Its Three Highest Prior Peaks in 1929, 2000 and 2022

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As of September 2026, the Shiller CAPE ratio for the S&P 500 sits at roughly 40.9, according to Robert Shiller's own dataset (Yale University) as compiled by data trackers such as multpl.com and GuruFocus. In about 145 years of monthly data, that level has only been exceeded once: the dot-com peak of December 1999–January 2000, when CAPE hit 44.2. Today's reading is higher than the 1929 peak (32.6) and higher than the December 2021 peak (38.3). That makes this the second-most expensive the U.S. stock market has ever looked by this particular yardstick. Below is what happened after each of the three highest prior CAPE peaks, with the actual numbers instead of a vague "history suggests caution." This article walks through the three highest prior CAPE peaks as case studies. For whether today’s reading predicts a crash and what it means for a long-term portfolio, see Does a CAPE of 41 Mean a Crash Is Coming? The New York Stock Exchange, seen from Federal Hall. P...
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S&P 500 Concentration Has Passed the 1932 Record. Here's What Happened the Last Three Times

Correction October 31, 2026: the 1932 benchmark in the table below was corrected from 37.7% to 37.3% (month-end May 31, 1932); 37.7% is the October 31, 2025 reading that passed it, now shown on its own row. The 2000 figure is labeled as an index-weight share. Source: Morningstar Indexes (CRSP data). The ten largest companies in the S&P 500 now control a bigger share of the index's total value than they did at the height of the Great Depression. That is not a loose comparison — it is what the actual market-capitalization data shows. Whether that matters for your own portfolio depends less on the headline number and more on what happened the last three times concentration reached an extreme like this. History does not repeat on a schedule, but it does leave a paper trail, and that trail is worth reading before assuming the current setup is permanent. The New York Stock Exchange, 18 Broad Street, Manhattan. Photo: Ken Lund, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 ( original file pag...
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How to Read a 10-K Filing: A Step-by-Step Guide for Retail Investors

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Correction November 7, 2026: three statements attributed to Microsoft's FY2026 Form 10-K were not in it and have been replaced with the filing's own language. The GAAP-to-non-GAAP gap is a single exclusion of net gains and losses from investments in OpenAI -- other income (expense), net included $6.5 billion of such net gains in fiscal 2026, primarily the dilution gain from the OpenAI Recapitalization -- not a $3.2 billion Anthropic gain plus severance timing. The MD&A highlights are Microsoft Cloud revenue up 27% to $214.4 billion and Azure and other cloud services up 41%, not an Azure dollar milestone or a Microsoft 365 Copilot seat count. The capital-intensity risk factor reads "significant capital and operational investments" made "in advance of fully developed revenue streams." The More Personal Computing decline is also re-attributed to XBOX, which the filing names as the driver. Source: Microsoft Corporation Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended Ju...
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Did High-Yield Credit Spreads Really Widen 29%? What the FRED Series Actually Shows

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The New York Stock Exchange -- credit spreads, traded in the bond market, often move before equity prices do. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons , public domain. Key takeaways The ICE BofA US High-Yield Option-Adjusted Spread closed at 3.44% on October 30, 2026 and 3.43% on November 2. That is not a 2026 high: the series printed 3.46% on March 30, 2026. The "29% in five weeks" framing depends entirely on which day you start from. Measured over the last 25 trading days to October 30 the rise is 17.4%, from 2.93% on September 25. Measured from the actual 2026 low - 2.60% on August 28, not 2.66% on September 21 - it is 32.3%, over two months rather than five weeks. Most of the move is two days old. The spread was 3.14% on October 28 and 3.44% on October 30, a 9.6% jump in two sessions after four straight sessions of narrowing. The 2008, 2016 and 2020 crisis peaks cannot be checked against this series any more. FRED's own series ...
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Gold Is Down 30.7% From Its January 2026 Record. Here's How That Compares With Gold's Five Worst Bear Markets on Record

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Gold's record-breaking rally ended in the dead of winter, and the reversal hasn't let up since. Spot gold peaked at $5,589.38 per troy ounce on January 28, 2026, then fell roughly 30.7% to $3,875.84 by October 30, 2026 — a nine-month round trip from a fresh all-time high back to levels last seen before the final leg of its 2025–2026 run. The real question for anyone holding gold, a gold ETF, or shares in a gold miner isn't whether this counts as a correction; a decline past 20% from a peak already clears that bar on its own. It's whether this looks like any of the five genuine gold bear markets the World Gold Council has documented since 1974 — and on the one measure that matters most for sizing a position, speed, this one is already moving faster than every single one of them. That speed is the real headline here, not the size of the drop. A 30.7% decline is, so far, smaller than every one of the five historical bear markets detailed below. But reaching it in roughl...
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S&P 500 Midterm-Year Pattern Since 1946: Does the 20-for-20 Record Hold for October 2026?

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Update November 6, 2026: October 2026 is now complete. The S&P 500 closed the month at 7,580.07 on October 30, down 0.93% from its September 30 close of 7,651.54 and up 10.73% for the year. Its highest daily close of 2026 was 7,818.93 on October 6, so the 7,844.52 “52-week high” cited below is not a closing level. On Election Day, November 3, the index closed at 7,568.92, 3.11% below the October 9 reference close used in this article; that close is the starting level for the 12-month post-election window Truist and UBS track (S&P Dow Jones Indices data via FRED, series SP500). One line about midterm years circulates every two years: since 1946, the S&P 500 has been positive in the twelve months after every single midterm election — twenty for twenty. It is the kind of statistic that gets repeated without anyone opening the spreadsheet. What follows takes the claim apart in three checks: what the counting window really is, what the raw annual returns say wh...
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The Stock Market's "Best Six Months" Start November 1. Here's What 76 Years of Data Actually Show

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Every November 1, the same statistic circulates: since 1950 the Dow Jones Industrial Average has averaged a 7.3% gain from November through April against just 0.8% from May through October. The claim is easy to repeat and hard to check, because the two most-cited sources publish different numbers, neither publishes the hit rates that get quoted alongside them, and the arithmetic example that usually follows does not reconcile. So this version is built out of comparison tables: one table per claim, with a column for what we could verify ourselves. The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Photo: Arnoldius, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons . File photo, not tied to any specific trading session discussed in this article. Key takeaways Fidelity, citing FactSet data since 1945, puts the S&P 500 at roughly 7% for November-April against about 2% for May-October. Those are price returns, dividends excluded. Our own count on 81 November-April windows since 1945 (Shiller monthl...
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Is a Sudden VIX Spike a Warning Sign? What October 30, 2026 Looks Like Next to 2018 and 2024

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The VIX closed at 19.42 on October 30, 2026 , up 2.22 points or 12.91% from 17.20 the session before, as an AI-spending sell-off took the S&P 500 down 1.82% and the Nasdaq Composite down 2.86%. Two sessions in the modern record are the ones people reach for when a volatility index jumps: February 5, 2018 and August 5, 2024. Put all three side by side and the 2026 move is the smallest of them by a wide margin - and it is smallest for a reason that has nothing to do with how bad the day felt. New York Stock Exchange trading floor, 1963. Photo by Thomas J. O'Halloran, U.S. News & World Report collection, Library of Congress , public domain. Key takeaways February 5, 2018: VIX 17.31 to 37.32 , a 115.6% single-session jump, off a base that had touched an all-time intraday low of 8.56 ten weeks earlier. Dow -1,175 points (-4.6%). August 5, 2024: VIX 23.39 to 38.57 , up 64.9% , off an already elevated base, on a yen carry-trade unwind. S&P 500 -3%. October 30, 202...
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Are S&P 500 Buybacks Flashing the Same Warning Sign as 2007 and 2018?

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Correction November 10, 2026: the 1% buyback excise tax was described as cutting Q3 2025 operating earnings by "roughly 0.36%–0.41%" and as already reflected in the reported buyback totals. S&P Dow Jones Indices reports 0.36% for operating earnings and 0.41% for As Reported (GAAP) earnings as two separate figures, and the tax reduces earnings rather than the buyback dollars; the buyback-yield passages now state that the 1.4% figure is this article's own calculation rather than a third-party tracker's. Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices, "S&P 500 Q3 2025 Buybacks" press release, December 18, 2025. Berkshire Hathaway told investors on November 7, 2026 that it spent roughly $9.6 billion buying back its own stock in the third quarter, its biggest buyback quarter ever. That announcement landed three weeks after Ned Davis Research reported that net S&P 500 buybacks had slipped back below the $1 trillion mark (on a trailing 12-month basis) for the first...
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The S&P 500's Dividend Yield Just Hit an All-Time Low of 1.05%. Here's Why It's Not Quite 2000 Again

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The S&P 500's dividend yield is the lowest it has ever been. The record itself is not in dispute — the series that produces it labels its own minimum as 1.05%, set in October 2026. What is worth an hour of your attention is that almost every word in the sentence "the dividend yield just hit an all-time low" is doing more work than it looks like, and three of them are doing something different from what most write-ups assume. Photo: Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño (Flickr) · original file page · CC BY 2.0 . Key takeaways The record is real: the series' stated minimum is 1.05%, October 2026 , against a 155-year mean of 4.20% and a maximum of 13.84% in June 1932. The most recent daily reading we could verify is 1.07% at the close on Friday, October 30, 2026 . Readings after June 2026 are estimates , not reported figures: the numerator is fixed at twelve months of dividends through June 2026. Every move since then is a price move by construction. The prio...
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The Personal Saving Rate Just Fell to 3.8% — the Lowest Since October 2022, and the 7th Percentile of 67 Years of Data

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Correction November 11, 2026: The original headline and opening paragraph said that only the mid-2000s pre-crisis years were consistently lower than September 2026's 3.8%. FRED's PSAVERT series shows eight consecutive months from March to October 2022 at 2.4%-3.6%, so the accurate statement is that 3.8% is the lowest reading since October 2022. Also corrected: the 2006-2007 band (1.9%-3.3%, not 1.9%-2.4%), the 1998-2001 range (3.7%-4.8%, which applies to September 1999-December 2000), the count of monthly declines in the past year (six of twelve, not nine) and the recession-pattern claim (two of three episodes, not two of two). Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis Personal Saving Rate (PSAVERT) via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Correction November 12, 2026: The episode table still showed the pre-correction 2006-2007 band of 1.9%-2.4%; it now shows 1.9%-3.3%, matching the text. The 1998-2001 row now states that the 3.7%-4.8% range covers September 1999 through Decembe...
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