Stock Market Today: Dow Falls 0.46 Percent as the Nasdaq Rises 1.09 Percent on a Hot Jobs Report
Friday's close split the market: chip stocks pulled the S&P 500 up 0.31 percent and the Nasdaq up 1.09 percent, while the Dow slipped 237 points. The week's totals are uglier — the S&P lost 2.7 percent and the Nasdaq 3.4 percent, their worst week since June.
Wall Street closed Friday the way it traded all day: split. The S&P 500 rose 23.13 points, or 0.31 percent, to 7,376.86, and the Nasdaq Composite rose 264.43 points, or 1.09 percent, to 24,579.42, as chip stocks recovered part of Thursday's losses — the semiconductor fund SMH gained 3.62 percent, AMD 11.04 percent and Nvidia 2.78 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average went the other way, falling 237.33 points, or 0.46 percent, to 51,285.73, while the small-cap Russell 2000 rose 0.89 percent to 2,754.11.
The day's driver was the morning's jobs report, which this station filed at midday: October payrolls rose 165,000 against about 65,000 expected, September was revised up to 60,000, August and September together were revised up by a combined 84,000, and unemployment fell to 4.1 percent from 4.2 percent, with average hourly earnings up 0.4 percent on the month. Strong data moved the rate market more than the stock market: the 2-year Treasury yield stood at 4.52 percent and the 10-year at 4.86 percent, and traders priced about a 78 percent chance of a December Federal Reserve rate hike, up from roughly two-thirds on Thursday.
Not everything bounced. Axon fell 18.18 percent after missing third-quarter estimates and cutting its 2026 revenue guidance, the day's standout loser in the closing accounts. And Friday's partial recovery did not repair the week: the S&P 500 lost 2.7 percent across the five sessions, the Nasdaq 3.4 percent and the Dow 0.9 percent — stocks' worst week since June, closing a stretch that ran from a post-election surge on Wednesday to Thursday's rout and Friday's narrow, chip-led relief bounce that faded from its highs.
For Texas savers and Austin's tech workforce, the week ends with the same tension it started with: an economy adding jobs at triple the forecast pace, and a market that no longer reads good jobs news as good news, because it prices another rate hike behind it. Futures reopen Sunday at 6:00 p.m. Eastern.
