US Stock Insights

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...

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...

Current Shiller CAPE: 40.71 (data month: October 2026) Percentile: 98.9th of 1,750 monthly readings since January 1881. Nineteen months were higher: eighteen between March 1999 and September 2000, plus August 2026 (40.99). Long-run mean 17.80 · median 16.61 · all-time high 44.20 (December 1999). Source: Robert Shiller, ie_data.xls on shillerdata.com, latest row as checked November 6, 2026; the percentile is computed from that file. Last updated: November 6, 2026 · next check: early December 2026. Short answer: a Shiller CAPE above 40 has never, in 145 years of data, said anything useful about when a decline would start — but it has said a great deal about the ten years that followed. In Robert Shiller's own spreadsheet the ratio stood at 40.71 for October 2026 , the 98.9th percentile of 1,750 monthly readings going back to January 1881, and all 21 earlier months that ever reached 40 were followed by a negative ten-year real return. The first of those 21 ...

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...

"It has never been negative before" — the table below says it has The "equity risk premium" (ERP) is simply the extra return stocks are expected to offer over safe bonds, measured here as the S&P 500's earnings yield minus the 10-year Treasury yield. As of October 23, 2026, the S&P 500's trailing earnings yield was 3.875% (GuruFocus), while the 10-year Treasury yield stood at 5.00% (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED, October 23, 2026). That makes the simple nominal ERP about -1.1 percentage points -- negative, meaning the stock market's earnings yield is currently lower than the "risk-free" return on a 10-year government bond. Depending on which earnings figure and which bond yield a given analyst uses, estimates right now range from roughly zero to notably negative; this article uses the nominal, nothing-fancy version so every number traces to a dated primary source, and treats the other published estimates as corroborating con...

Every time the Buffett Indicator sets a new record, the same headline follows: stocks have never been this expensive relative to the economy, so a crash must be coming. The indicator really did set a record in 2026. But "record high" and "imminent crash" are two different claims, and the historical record of this specific ratio does not support jumping from one to the other. The last time this ratio spent a comparable stretch at an extreme level was 2021 through early 2022 — and the ratio stayed elevated for the better part of a year before the market's largest drawdown actually arrived. Timing a market top off a single valuation ratio has a weak track record, even when the ratio itself is accurately measured. This piece walks through where today's reading actually sits in the long-run distribution, why two reputable sources disagree on the exact number, and what the honest, unexciting takeaway is for a long-term investor. Six questions decide whether a rec...