US Market Breakdown: Jobs Shock Lifts Big Tech, Week of 28 September 2026

The defining number of the week was 29,000. That is how many jobs the American economy added in September, on the Bureau of Labor Statistics report published on Friday 2 October, against the 84,000 economists polled by Dow Jones had pencilled in. Revisions stripped a further 60,000 jobs out of the previous two months, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.2% from 4.1%.

Weak economic news was read as good market news, because the Federal Reserve is still in tightening mode rather than cutting: traders who had spent September bracing for another rate rise dropped the idea within hours.

The result was a lopsided week. The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.5% and booked a third straight weekly gain, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1.3% and the S&P 500 slipped 0.3%. Monday's session, the most recent completed on Wall Street, widened that gap again.

Wall Street

Friday's rally did most of the week's heavy lifting. The S&P 500 climbed 0.7% to close at 7,722.72, the Dow added roughly 250 points, or 0.5%, to about 51,176, and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.2% to 27,190.86 after setting an intraday record. It was not enough to rescue the blue-chip indices, both of which finished the five days lower.

The reason the Dow and the S&P struggled while the Nasdaq advanced was the bond market. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed to its highest in more than two decades on Wednesday 30 September — CNBC reported a session high of 5.29% — and high long-dated yields are a direct headwind for the dividend-paying industrials and staples that carry more weight in the Dow than in the Nasdaq. Even on Friday the relief was partial: yields dipped on the payrolls miss, then reversed to end the day up almost five basis points at 5.281%. Beneath the surface, 60 S&P 500 constituents hit fresh 52-week lows over the week against just 14 new highs.

Monday 5 October extended the pattern. The Nasdaq closed at a record 27,477.31, up 1.05%, having traded as high as 27,544.07. The S&P 500 rose 0.66% to 7,773.95 and the Dow managed only 0.18%, or 90.94 points, to 51,267.90. Megacap technology did the work: Meta Platforms added almost 2%, Microsoft more than 1%, and Nvidia and Tesla about 2% each. Nvidia hit an all-time high, trading near $237 and clearing its previous record close of $235.74 from 14 May. The wider chip complex did not follow: the PHLX Semiconductor Index fell about 0.7%.

The week's biggest movers

Fair Isaac was the week's disaster. Shares fell 27% on Tuesday 29 September — their worst day in more than 30 years — after Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would move to a unified mortgage pricing model incorporating data from VantageScore. Fannie and Freddie stand behind roughly 70% of the American mortgage market, and for decades a FICO score was the only one they would accept.

Carnival was the mirror image. The cruise operator reported adjusted earnings of $1.43 a share on revenue of $8.44bn, ahead of forecasts, with third-quarter customer deposits at a record $7.6bn and 2027 booked occupancy and pricing already at record levels. It lifted full-year adjusted earnings guidance to about $2.24 a share. Shares closed 13.4% higher at $25.11, and the read-across lifted the sector: Royal Caribbean rose 7.5% to $260.73 and Norwegian Cruise Line added 3.4% to $14.80.

Synopsys, which sells the software chip designers use to lay out silicon, gained about 13% on Thursday to $490.54 after an Investor Day at which it guided fiscal 2027 revenue to $11.10bn-$11.20bn against the $10.81bn analysts expected, and adjusted earnings to $19.04-$19.12 a share against $17.81. It also disclosed a revenue-sharing arrangement with OpenAI to build an AI model for chip design, plus a partnership with Amazon Web Services.

Lumentum's move came from the optics side of the AI build-out: Citi turned more positive on its position in optical circuit switching, and separately Lumentum, Qualcomm and Corning unveiled a high-density optical die-to-die AI interconnect built on Lumentum's 1,060nm VCSEL platform, timed for the ECOC 2026 conference.

AppLovin fell to a fresh 52-week low after a securities class action filed in mid-September alleged it had misrepresented the development of its AI advertising business, and after Edgewater Research told clients its channel checks suggested AppLovin's market-share gains had stalled; the stock closed lower in seven consecutive sessions. Western Digital fell as the market weighed a $109.5m convertible-note redemption and the dilution that could follow, on top of a cooling AI-storage trade.

Company news in focus

The week's largest corporate announcement had nothing to do with earnings. On Monday 28 September, Nvidia's board authorised an additional $150bn of share repurchases, taking the remaining authorisation to $235bn and making it the largest single increase to a buyback programme in corporate history — bigger than Apple's $110bn expansion in 2024. Shares closed near $228.86 that day; by Friday the stock had touched an intraday record of $237.88 and a market value of roughly $5.7trn, about £4.3trn converted at the $1.32 sterling was fetching.

Also on 28 September, AMD confirmed it would buy World Labs, the spatial-intelligence research outfit co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2bn. Li joins AMD as executive vice-president and chief scientist, and the deal is expected to close by the end of 2026.

Media consolidation cleared its last gate. A California judge approved Paramount Skydance's settlement with California and other states on 30 September, removing the final obstacle to its roughly $110bn takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery; the investment-grade bond offering launched to fund it on 29 September drew more than $109bn of orders. In semiconductors, Skyworks said on 30 September it had secured every regulatory approval needed for its roughly $22bn merger with Qorvo, Chinese clearance being the last piece.

Broadcom disclosed on 1 October that it would provide the AI developer Anthropic with up to $42bn of financing tied to chip supply and equipment leasing, through convertible notes covering roughly a third of Anthropic's $125.2bn five-year commitment for computing capacity. Broadcom separately raised $60bn in debt. The arrangement, revealed in Anthropic's IPO prospectus, drew immediate commentary about circular financing in the AI supply chain.

In the boardroom, General Mills said on 30 September that its directors had elected chief operating officer Dana McNabb to succeed Jeff Harmening as chief executive from 1 January 2027, with Harmening becoming executive chair.

Earnings in focus

Three results defined the week, and the share-price reactions had almost nothing in common.

Accenture produced the most dramatic. The consultancy reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings of $3.29 a share on revenue of $18.68bn, against LSEG consensus of $3.18 and $18.03bn. More important for a business that spent 2026 being written off as an AI casualty, bookings were a record: 141 individual client bookings of $100m or more in the quarter and full-year bookings of $84.5bn. Chief executive Julie Sweet said the firm ended the year with $85bn of new business heading into the next one, having signed agreements during the quarter with Google Cloud, Anthropic and Amazon Web Services. The stock rose as much as 22% on Thursday and closed up about 16% — its largest one-day gain on record.

Micron Technology produced the most extraordinary numbers and the least reaction. Fiscal fourth-quarter revenue was a record $54.23bn, up 379% year on year, with adjusted earnings of $33.42 a share against about $31.16 expected. Guidance for the current quarter was roughly $61.5bn of revenue and $38.15 a share, both far above consensus. The shares closed at $1,066.10 — up 0.1% — and slipped 0.78% after hours. Following a run of more than 500% over a year, a blowout quarter moved the stock almost not at all.

Jabil showed the other failure mode: the contract manufacturer beat on both lines, with core earnings of $4.40 a share on revenue of $10.6bn against forecasts of $4.06 and $9.69bn, and still fell about 10% as investors focused on the phasing of its fiscal 2027 margin guidance. Moderna was not reporting but moved on analyst action: Citi cut it to a sell rating after a near-600% rally driven largely by August data from its cancer vaccine programme with Merck. Shares fell 5.35% on Thursday to $192.57.

Sectors in focus

Technology was the only S&P 500 sector to beat the index over the week, and it set an all-time high on Friday; weekly tallies put the gain at between 1.4% and 1.8% depending on the measure. Energy was the only other sector up more than 1%, and at industry-group level semiconductors, software and energy led. Health care was the clear laggard, down 2.7%.

Concentration remains the central feature of this market. The S&P 500's total return for 2026 stood at 13.7% in early October, but research from Guinness Global Investors notes the ten largest constituents as of end-2025 have grown their combined market capitalisation by 29% this year, against about 19% for the index. One widely circulated weekly market review went further, calculating that through the 1 October close just 28 stocks accounted for the entirety of the index's year-to-date return. Monday made the point neatly: the Nasdaq set a record while the semiconductor index fell, so even within the AI trade the gains were landing on a handful of names.

Macro and the Fed

Inflation data came in soft before the jobs report did. The August personal consumption expenditures index, published on Wednesday 30 September, rose 0.3% on the month and 3.4% on the year, against expectations of 0.4% and 3.7%. Core PCE rose 0.2% and 3.0%, against 0.3% and 3.3% expected — though the Bureau of Economic Analysis also revised its methodology for certain components back to 2021, which took roughly 0.3 percentage points off the core measure.

Taken with Friday's payrolls, where average hourly earnings rose just 0.1% on the month and 3.0% on the year — the slowest annual wage growth since 2021 — the week's data pointed the same way. CME's FedWatch tool put the odds of a quarter-point rise at the 28 October meeting at roughly 17% by Friday, down from about 36% a week earlier, while the prediction market Kalshi showed around 18% against almost 70% seven days before. New York Fed president John Williams and vice chair Philip Jefferson both signalled no urgency, though Williams still described one further rise this year as reasonable, and December odds stayed above 75% on FedWatch. Monday's ISM services survey complicated matters: the headline index eased to 54.9 from 55.4, a 27th consecutive month of expansion, but prices paid rose to 74.0, the highest since July 2022. Yields moved up on the release.

Oil had a violent week that netted out to little: WTI crude finished at $91.11, lower on the week, while Brent closed at $102.25, roughly flat, leaving an unusually wide premium of more than $11. Brent had jumped $4.28 in one session on Chinese refiners suspending product exports for October, before an emergency reserve release pulled WTI back. Gold held above $4,150 an ounce, and the pound sat at about $1.32, close to its weakest of 2026 — which flatters the sterling value of American holdings and makes fresh dollar purchases dearer.

Still to come

Wednesday's FOMC minutes are the main event, since they should show how much support there is on the committee for tightening beyond what September's dot plot implied. Tesla reports third-quarter results on 21 October, having already disclosed 486,532 deliveries on 2 October, ahead of the roughly 461,100 analysts expected.

This article is for information and education only. It is not financial advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any investment. Always do your own research.