Stocks Fall As Yields Shoot Higher

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Rob Black (0:11)

Good morning. September 23, 2026, SP 500's down one half of 1%.

It's about one and a half percent from its all time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average down one third of 1%. The NASDAQ down 80 basis points. Hid an all time high and closed an all time high yesterday. Russell 2000's down 1.1%.

Gold's down about 1% at 43.30. I'm expecting another move higher for gold. Not imminently, but not too far off into the future.

I think the setup is there.

Elsewhere, Bitcoin's down 2%, down $1,800 to $84,566.

Today, the story is the story that's driving Wall Street. It's bonds again. Bonds and inflation and expectation for higher yields. Coming from a Fed governor, treasury yield on the 30 years, it's at 5.37%.

Near an area where it seriously might be a wise idea to lock in for the income portion of your portfolio and retirement that you want on the conservative side. I'm building towards the dividend side of income and retirement, but even I am pretty tempted at these levels.

Ten-year treasury sits at 5.06%, well above 5% again today and in a problematic area. When you can get 5.06% from the 10-year, why put money in the stocks? If you want risk-free, you would stay in the bond. If you want risk and a market that's at 1% from all-time highs, then you would go stocks.

I don't have the answer for you, unfortunately. I think somewhere in between is the right idea of what works for you. Let's just say what works for you. Looking at individual names, I'm seeing a lot of tech names hit today. Xandisk and Micron down 1-2%, Qualcomm down 1%, Google down 2.7%, Disney's down fractions, telling you that tech is the one taking the brunt of the selling today. Meta's up 20 bucks, up 2.8%, I'm sorry, to 757 A little dyslexia kicking in there that I don't have, but in the moment I did have. Again, non-tech names seem to be holding and faring better today than tech. NVIDIA's down 3 bucks, down 1.4%, while Target is down a buck.

Caterpillar is up a fractionally. Again, I'm not trying to make a thesis here or a case for anything. I'm just telling you what I'm seeing today. Coming up, I'm gonna have Patrick O'Hare talk about current market additions, and you can hear what he has and what he's seen today. The S&P, Nasdaq and Dow, all in the red. Oil prices are slightly higher after American and Iranian officials met yesterday at the UN in New York. Iran is saying to the UN today that it's Trump and Israel's fault for the global instability and the higher oil prices. And the higher oil prices creates the diesel shock. I'm gonna bring this up with Patrick in the second segment of, we seem to be hyper-focused on new statistics that roll through Wall Street, new insights on a regular basis. And diesel's not one that I've talked about a lot in the last 30 years, maybe four or five times. US Gulf Coast diesel crack spread. What is a crack spread? It sounds funny, does it not? It's the difference between the price of diesel and crude oil. Recently topped $100 a barrel versus a more normal range of $15 to $30. That matters because diesel isn't just something consumers put in their tanks. It is an input cost for moving and producing almost everything, from trucking to rail, for agriculture, construction equipment and manufacturing. So unlike a gasoline spike, which can hit consumers more directly through their household budgets, a sustained diesel shock can work its way through the entire supply chain. Gas spike hits homes and households. We spend less when we go out shopping, less when we go out to eat. But the sustained diesel shock hits the whole supply chain on everything that consumers were eventually going to want to consume. Higher transportation and production costs eventually show up in the prices businesses charge. Diesel costs stay elevated. What starts as an energy shock can become a broader inflation problem, potentially keeping interest rates higher for longer. MetaConnect is here today. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's keynote address is set for this afternoon or early evening, 7 o'clock Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific. So a lot of news is going to be trickling out between now and then. It's one of the reasons Muse and Meta. Well, Muse is the reason Meta has been moving higher recently, but this conference could get some market moving news for Meta as well. The Muse app has created a lot of buzz. KeyBank hiked its price target to 900 from 780 while analysts watching for monetization paths and improved developer relationships with the conference Connect unveiling lots of information later in the day.