Changed little

The deeper account

The report came at half past eight, an hour before the opening bell. Payrolls rose 29,000 in September; health care added 17,000, construction 11,000 and manufacturing 9,000, and financial activities lost 7,000. "Employment in all major industries changed little over the month," the release said. Average hourly earnings rose five cents, 0.1 percent, to $37.81, and 3.0 percent over the year. The unemployment rate rose a tenth to 4.2 percent, and the release added that it "has remained in a narrow range of 4.1 percent to 4.3 percent since March." Then the revisions: "The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised down by 31,000, from +21,000 to -10,000, and the change for August was revised down by 29,000, from +162,000 to +133,000." The next report, for October, is due on 6 November.

The index opened at 7,726.24, 59.79 points above Thursday's close, and never went back down to it; its lowest print of the day was 34.06 points clear. Between 9:44 and 10:57 it closed forty-eight minutes above 7,743.41, last Friday's close, and in those minutes the week was up — the only stretch of the week in which the index stood above where the week began. It made its high, 7,754.67, at 10:42. Then the bond market turned. The long-bond fund, which had been up as much as 0.78 percent at 10:20, fell from about 10:40 and was below Thursday's close by 11:20, and in the same forty-three minutes the index fell 54.16 points, to 7,700.51 at 11:25. After noon it moved inside a band of 16.62 points. It crossed its own opening price twenty-three times in the day and closed above it in 107 of the session's 391 minutes, the last at 3:53. The settle, 7,722.72, was 3.52 under the open.

That makes five. On Monday the index closed 38.01 points below where it opened, on Tuesday 28.76, on Wednesday 37.45, on Thursday two cents and on Friday 3.52: every session of the week finished under its own first trade, and all of the week's rising was done while the market was shut. The week's own page counts it up.

Underneath, ten of the eleven sectors rose, consumer discretionary 1.13 percent with Tesla and Amazon, technology 1.03 with the chips: the semiconductor fund rose 2.18 percent, Broadcom 3.34, AMD 2.93 and Nvidia 1.36, after Nvidia had touched a record of $237.87 in the first hour, when it was worth about $5.72 trillion. Oracle rose 3.22 percent and Alphabet 1.58. Hewlett Packard Enterprise rose 7.37 percent on the back of its networking investor day earlier in the week, a $1.2 billion order for AI server racks and a run of higher price targets. Only health care fell, by three hundredths of a percent. The equal-weight fund rose 0.35 percent, half the index's 0.73. The Dow rose 250.40 points to 51,176.96, the Nasdaq Composite 1.19 percent to 27,190.86, touching an intraday record on the way, and the Russell 2000 0.94 percent; the VIX fell 1.08 to 15.31.

The day's worst were a pair. Seagate fell 10.21 percent and Western Digital 10.26 after Nikkei reported that Toshiba plans to spend ¥60 billion, about $400 million, to double its hard-drive capacity by fiscal 2027 at its factory in the Philippines, to sell into the storage demand of AI data centres. Seagate had risen about 240 percent this year and Western Digital about 170; Citi's analyst wrote that Toshiba relies on outside suppliers for key parts. Tesla rose 4.68 percent after delivering 486,532 cars in the third quarter, 24,558 more than the consensus the company had compiled and 2.1 percent fewer than the record quarter a year earlier. Accenture, which rose 15.78 percent on Thursday, fell 6.29 percent to $198.94 and kept a little over half of it.

The Federal Reserve meets on 27 and 28 October. On Monday traders put the chance of a rise in rates at that meeting at 70.3 percent; by Wednesday, after a cooler inflation reading, it was 37; after Friday's report CNBC put the chance of the Fed holding at 77 percent. Bond yields fell on the number and then rose through the day, and the ten-year finished at about 5.28 percent, up almost five basis points. Thursday's high of 5.34 had been the highest since 2002.

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. And the opening price here is the feed's first print of the day, 7,726.24; every session it is compared with is measured the same way.

In the photograph it is late on a wedding night in a white marquee strung with bulbs, and the guests have cleared the floor for the limbo. A bridesmaid in grape-coloured satin holds one end of the ribbon-wound bar and a groomsman the other, and the ring of guests is laughing and clapping, because in this one game the room cheers the bar for going lower. The man in the grey suit is the next one under it, knees bent, leaning back, his paper bag held to his chest, looking up at the bar. Nobody can tell yet whether he will clear it.