Weekly Market Commentary

The Noble Weekly Review

Week of October 12 – 16, 2026  •  Published October 19, 2026

Market Scorecard — Last Week

Gabe's Weekly Perspective

Two weeks ago I told you I thought rates would come down, and I was honest that the long end of the bond market had refused to cooperate. Last week it finally did. Long term Treasuries rose 2.85%, the strongest week they have had in some time, and the odds of a rate increase this month have largely evaporated. My call is working. But it is working for a reason I did not give you, and I would rather explain that than take a victory lap.

Moving Higher

Under Pressure

What Moved Markets Last Week

Inflation Came In Hot and Bonds Rallied Anyway

Wednesday brought the September inflation report and it was not good. Consumer prices rose 3.7% from a year earlier, above the 3.6% economists expected. The immediate reaction was exactly what you would predict. Stocks had their worst single day since July and the ten year Treasury yield shot up to 5.33%.

Then it reversed. By Friday the ten year had fallen back to roughly 5.09%, well below where it started the week, and long term Treasury bonds finished up 2.85%. Traders now put the odds of the Federal Reserve holding rates steady at its late October meeting at around 85%. Read that sequence again, because it is unusual: inflation came in hotter than expected and the bond market rallied anyway. That tells you something about what investors think the Fed can actually accomplish here.

The AI Trade Cracked

The reason bonds rallied is the other half of the story. Technology stocks had a genuinely bad week. The Nasdaq fell 5.32%, its worst stretch in a long while, and broke below a level that many traders watch closely. Nvidia dropped 6.38% and Tesla 7.29%. Across the twenty largest artificial intelligence and semiconductor companies globally, more than a trillion dollars of market value came off in a single week, and the main chip index has fallen more than 14% over seven trading sessions.

The new worry is not whether artificial intelligence works. It is how the enormous buildout gets paid for. Investors started asking harder questions last week about the debt and financing behind data center construction, and about what happens to returns as more companies compete to build the same thing. When that anxiety took hold, money moved out of technology and into Treasury bonds, which is the flight to safety that pushed yields down.

Where My Call Actually Stands

So let me be straight with you about my own scorecard. The direction I predicted is happening. The ten year yield has fallen from 5.28% two weeks ago to about 5.09%. The expectation of further rate increases has mostly disappeared. If you only looked at the outcome, you would say the call was right.

But the mechanism was not the one I described. My argument was that this inflation came from an energy supply shock, that resolving the conflict in the Middle East would bring prices down, and that rates would follow. Instead inflation came in hot, and rates fell because investors got scared of technology stocks and ran to the safety of bonds. That is a different story with a similar ending, and you should know the difference.

There is a second point worth making against myself. Part of my reasoning was that the artificial intelligence buildout would proceed no matter what the Fed did, because the money was already committed. Last week the market began questioning exactly that assumption. If financing for these projects really is in doubt, then one of the supports under my argument is weaker than I thought.

That said, I do not want to over correct, and this is worth saying plainly. Markets move on doubt constantly, and the doubt is frequently wrong. A week of heavy selling tells you what investors were feeling, not what is going to turn out to be true. We have now watched this market question the artificial intelligence story twice in two months. In September it was prominent industry figures calling for a slowdown in development. Last week it was financing and debt. Both times the selling was real and immediate. Whether either worry proves correct is a completely separate question, and it takes far longer than a week to answer.

This is the case for conviction when you are investing over a long horizon. If you revise your thinking every time the market has a difficult stretch, you are not investing, you are reacting, and reacting is expensive. The discipline is to change your mind when the facts change and to hold steady when only the mood changes. I will update my view when the evidence tells me to. I am not going to update it because prices moved for five days.

The Rotation Underneath

For several weeks I have been writing that this market was dangerously narrow, carried by a handful of very large technology companies. Last week that finally changed, though not in the pleasant way. The Dow Jones actually rose 0.52% and posted its second consecutive weekly gain while the Nasdaq fell more than 5%. Berkshire Hathaway gained 2.83%, JPMorgan 1.62% and Apple 1.55%.

Money did not leave the market. It moved. Out of expensive growth and into banks, insurers, industrials and bonds. This is what the concentration risk I kept describing looks like when it finally expresses itself, and it is worth noticing that the broadening happened because technology fell rather than because everything else rose.

What This Means for Your Portfolio

If you own a diversified portfolio, last week was the week it earned its keep. Bonds, which have been a drag for a month, rose while stocks fell. Value oriented holdings gained while growth names dropped. That is precisely the behavior diversification is supposed to produce, and it rarely feels relevant until a week like this one arrives.

I am not going to tell you the technology selloff is finished, or that it is the start of something larger, because I do not know. What I will say is that a market this concentrated was always going to have a week like this eventually, and the portfolios we build assume that. If you want to talk through your own mix, particularly if you have been watching the technology names closely, this is a reasonable moment for that conversation.

On the Radar — October 19 – 23

• Tuesday, October 27
  PayPal (PYPL) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $1.34)
• Tuesday, October 27
  SoFi Technologies (SOFI) earnings — before the open(Est. EPS: $0.17)
• Tuesday, October 27
  Visa (V) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $3.50)
• Wednesday, October 28
  Alphabet (GOOGL) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $3.10)
• Wednesday, October 28
  Microsoft (MSFT) earnings(Est. EPS: $4.82)
• Wednesday, October 28
  ServiceNow (NOW) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $1.04)
• Thursday, October 29
  Amazon (AMZN) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $2.00)
• Thursday, October 29
  Coinbase (COIN) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $-0.09)
• Thursday, October 29
  Intel (INTC) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $0.40)
• Thursday, October 29
  Mastercard (MA) earnings — before the open(Est. EPS: $5.31)