Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
Stocks took their worst beating since July today as a hotter-than-expected September inflation print rattled traders and forced a hard reset on rate expectations. The consumer price index came in above forecasts, pushing the probability of a Fed rate hike at the October twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth meeting to roughly thirty-three percent. The ten-year Treasury yield spiked in response, the dollar surged, and equities sold off broadly, with AI-linked names hit especially hard as confidence in that trade showed fresh signs of wavering.
That dollar strength spilled directly into crypto markets, where Bitcoin fell sharply as rate-hike odds climbed. The dynamic is straightforward: a stronger dollar and rising yields pull capital away from risk assets, and Bitcoin remains deeply sensitive to that rotation. Traders who had been leaning long into the AI and crypto convergence narrative found themselves caught on the wrong side of a single inflation print.
And yet amid the selloff, Apple quietly crossed a milestone that deserves acknowledgment. The company closed above five trillion dollars in market capitalization, becoming the first publicly traded firm to reach that threshold. That Apple did so on one of the market's ugliest sessions in months speaks to the gravitational pull of its balance sheet and the loyalty of its long-term holders.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
