Two cents

The deeper account

At ten o'clock the Institute for Supply Management published its survey of American factories for September. The headline barely moved — 54.5, from 54.6 — and new orders and hiring both rose. But the index of prices paid jumped 6.8 points to 77.9, from 71.1. The S&P 500 lost 13.71 points in the minute from ten o'clock and 36.61 in the quarter hour from 9:52, and at 10:00 it went below Wednesday's close. The ten-year Treasury yield rose as high as 5.34 percent, its highest since 2002, and the thirty-year to a 24-year high. The index made its low, 7,616.78, at 11:11: 49.69 points under its opening price and 34.76 under Wednesday's close. At half past eight first-time jobless claims had fallen for a fourth week, to 197,000.

Yields turned before midday and the index followed, slowly and then quickly. It crossed back above Wednesday's close for good at 1:18, went above its own opening price at 1:25 for the first time since 9:55, and between the 1:15 minute and the 1:30 minute gained 27.11 points, 10.09 of them in the 1:30 minute alone. Yahoo credited the comeback to falling yields and to the AI trade, Micron's results of the night before among it, and mentioned a Bloomberg report that Anthropic was preparing to list its shares as soon as mid-November; this page cannot put either at a minute. From 2:23 the index closed every minute above its opening price, and at 3:51 it touched 7,684.75, 18.28 above it. In the minute from 3:50, when the exchanges begin publishing the closing auction's imbalance, it rose 4.93 — the same minute on Wednesday had fallen 8.67 — and from the high it then fell 18.30 points to the settle. The lowest minute close after 2:23 came at 3:58, 7,666.55, eight cents above the open. The settle, 7,666.45, was two cents under it.

Two cents is very close. The feed records an opening price for the S&P 500 that differs from the previous close on 5,849 sessions since 1997; before that, and on many days in the 1990s, its opening print simply repeats a close, and those days are left out. On sixteen of the 5,849 the index finished within two cents of where it opened. Thursday is the seventeenth, and the first since 11 February 2021. Measured as a share of the price, which at 7,666 makes two cents very little, only six sessions finished closer, and in the feed's record each of those six closed exactly on its opening print. Among the 188 sessions of 2026 the next closest is 19 February, at 55 cents.

Underneath the index the day split down the middle. Five sectors rose, five fell, and consumer discretionary finished unchanged at the last trade. Energy rose 1.93 percent with Brent crude up about three percent through $100 a barrel, after reports that China had suspended its October fuel exports; technology rose 1.09 and the chip fund 1.36; industrials 1.01. Health care fell 1.32 percent and communication services 0.91, Alphabet 1.69. Banks fell with long yields this high — Citigroup 1.92 percent, Bank of America 1.31. The equal-weight fund rose 0.49 percent, more than the index's 0.18. The Dow rose 20.51 points to 50,926.56 and the Nasdaq Composite 10.54 to 26,871.60; both reconcile with this book's Wednesday closes. The VIX finished at 16.39, from 16.34.

Mattel rose 18.80 percent to $15.04. Between 2:10 and 2:30 in the afternoon, as the Wall Street Journal reported that Authentic Brands Group had approached the toy maker about a takeover at more than $20 a share, it went from about $12.57 to $16.51; it reached $16.70, up 31.87 percent, and gave back more than a third of that by the close. Synopsys rose 12.78 percent after its investor day, at which it forecast revenue of $11.1 to $11.2 billion next year, above estimates, and described agreements with Amazon Web Services and OpenAI and a $1 billion buyback. Micron, which had reported after Wednesday's close, rose 3.06 percent. Corteva appears in the day's tables down 83.81 percent and lost nothing of the kind: on Thursday it completed the separation of its seed business, which began trading as Vylor, and its shareholders now hold both. Nike closed at $35.15, down 0.71 percent, reported its quarter after the bell, and was trading at $32.24 in the evening.

Philip Jefferson, the Fed's vice chair, said inflation "has remained too high" and that the central bank should watch what the bond market was telling it: "My colleagues and I will need to come to our own judgment, which may take more time." The week, with the September payrolls report still to come on Friday, is down 76.96 points; the year is up 820.95, or 11.99 percent.

Two honest notes. The closes shown for individual companies and funds are the feed's last regular-session trades, because the official closing prints were not yet published when this page was built — except Accenture's, which is the $212.30 reported at the close; the feed's last trade was $212.54, and either is below its 2008 record. And the opening price here is the feed's first print of the day, 7,666.47, and every session it is compared with is measured the same way.

In the photograph it is about five o'clock on the first evening of October in a mown field, and a big hot-air balloon of cream and indigo panels has just come down — right beside the open trailer and the old pickup it was unloaded from that morning, the fan that filled it, the canvas sheet it was laid out on, two camp chairs and a thermos. The woman with the split face still has her hand on the burner and is looking up into the balloon. The man in the grey suit is halfway over the side of the basket with his paper bag, turning to tell her where they have landed. A man from the ground crew walks in with the rope, as though nothing about it were unusual.