Wall Street's week: a 24-year yield high and Accenture's best day

The S&P 500 lost 76.96 points over the first four sessions of this week, closing on Thursday at 7,666.45 against the 7,743.41 it carried in from the previous Friday — a fall of almost exactly 1%. For a week containing a record set of memory-chip results, the largest buyback increase in Nvidia's history and the best session Accenture has ever had, that is very little to show in the index.

The reason is that the week's real action was not in equities at all. It was in the US government bond market. The 10-year Treasury yield — the benchmark that effectively sets the discount rate on every American share a British investor holds — opened the week at 5.23%, its highest since 2007, and by Thursday morning had reached 5.33%, a level last seen in 2002. Every equity rally this week had to climb over that yield, and most of them did not manage it.

Then, on Friday morning, the pattern broke — and it broke on a weak labour market rather than a strong one. The September employment report showed employers adding just 29,000 jobs against forecasts of roughly 90,000, with unemployment ticking up to 4.2% from 4.1%. Traders read a softer jobs market as reducing the pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise rates again, the 10-year yield fell back to around 5.18%, and shares rose. Friday's session is still open as this is published — Wall Street trades until 16:00 New York time, 21:00 in London — so the figures below for Friday are intraday, not closing levels.

How the week unfolded

Our daily notes logged the week's mood as risk-off on Monday, cautious on Tuesday, risk-on on Wednesday and mixed on both Thursday and Friday. That arc tracks one story: an oil-driven inflation scare pushing long-dated bond yields to multi-decade highs, and equities trying repeatedly to look past it.

Monday's note was the risk-off one, and the trigger was geopolitical. President Trump rejected Iran's weekend proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, WTI crude jumped around 4% to near $91 a barrel and the 10-year yield touched 5.23%. The S&P 500 closed down 0.77% at 7,683.69, the Dow fell 0.67% to 51,481.51 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.92% to 26,820.38. Tuesday brought no relief but no fresh damage either: the Dow slipped 131.59 points, or 0.26%, to 51,349.92, the S&P 500 eased 0.16% to 7,670.84 and the Nasdaq Composite shed 0.09% to 26,797.54.

Tuesday also delivered the week's first clear miss against what we had flagged. Our note that morning pointed to the Conference Board's consumer confidence reading, due at 10:00 ET, with economists expecting a modest rise to around 90.0. It did not rise. The index fell 6.7 points to 81.9, its weakest since April 2014, with the Conference Board reporting that references to the cost of petrol and oil had hit new highs in the survey. The energy shock driving the bond market was already showing up in household sentiment.

Wednesday appeared to turn the week, and the reversal is instructive. The August personal consumption expenditures report — the inflation gauge the Fed actually targets — came in cooler than forecast, with headline PCE at 3.4% year-on-year against 3.7% previously and core easing to 3% from 3.3%. Yields fell, futures rose, and our note logged the day risk-on. Yet it did not hold: the Dow closed down almost 444 points at 50,906.05 and the S&P 500 slipped to 7,651.54, with only the Nasdaq Composite finishing higher, at 26,861.06. A benign inflation print was not enough on its own.

Thursday is where the catalysts we had flagged since Monday finally landed, and both beat. The index response was nonetheless almost nil: the S&P 500 closed up 0.19% at 7,666.45, the Dow added 0.04% to 50,926.56 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.04% to 26,871.60 — because that was also the morning the 10-year yield hit its 24-year high of 5.33%.

Friday's jobs report was the catalyst our Monday note had named as the week's biggest, and it was the one that moved the needle, though not in the direction a strong print would have. In afternoon trading in New York, the Dow is up around 0.5%, the S&P 500 around 0.7% and the Nasdaq Composite around 1.2%, led by technology. One complication for anyone tracking US data from the UK: Friday's figures were collected before the federal government shutdown that began this week, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics has since cancelled the October jobs report.

The names that moved it

Accenture was the week's defining single stock, and it is an unusual one to say that about. The consultancy's fiscal fourth-quarter results, published before Thursday's opening bell, showed revenue up 6.3% year-on-year to $18.7bn — roughly $660m ahead of estimates — earnings of $3.29 a share against about $3.18 expected, and new bookings of $22.2bn. The shares were indicated 19% higher before the open, traded up more than 22% at one point and closed around 16% higher, its best day on record. Alongside the results came news that Accenture and Anthropic will each commit at least $1bn over five years to build an embedded AI-evaluation unit inside Anthropic's model-development teams. For a sector told for two years that artificial intelligence would eat its billable hours, a record bookings number was the answer the market wanted. More on our Accenture page.

Micron Technology was the other catalyst we flagged early and the larger number by far. Our Monday note pencilled in revenue near $52bn when the chipmaker reported after Wednesday's close; the actual figure was $54.23bn, against a consensus closer to $51.07bn, with adjusted earnings of $33.42 a share versus about $31.16 expected. Memory pricing is where the AI build-out shows up most directly, and the read-through was immediate overseas: Tokyo's Nikkei 225 jumped 3.1% to a record close on chipmakers the following morning. Micron shares themselves eased slightly after hours on the scale of planned capital spending — beating on revenue and committing to spend it are read as two different things. Details are on our Micron page.

The rest of the week's movers were specific rather than thematic. Nvidia rose about 1.2% on Monday after lifting its buyback authorisation by $150bn, taking the total to $235bn — the largest such increase it has made. Fair Isaac, the credit-scoring group behind the FICO score, fell 18% on Tuesday after the Federal Housing Finance Agency said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would merge their mortgage-pricing grids into one that admits VantageScore alongside FICO. Advanced Micro Devices gained more than 1% on agreeing to buy the AI lab World Labs for $8.2bn, and Alphabet added roughly 2% on Thursday after launching its Gemini 4 Argon model.

The week's clearest disappointment arrived after Thursday's bell. Nike reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $11.21bn, short of estimates, announced a restructuring with job cuts and guided to a high-single-digit percentage revenue decline for fiscal 2027. The shares fell as much as 6.6% after hours before paring the loss to around 3.6%. British holders of US consumer names should note the convention: Nike's "fiscal first quarter" covers the summer months, because its financial year starts in June — American companies often run financial years unrelated to the calendar, which is why a Q1 report lands in autumn. You can screen US names by sector and valuation on our screener.

What to watch next week

The federal data calendar is the thing to watch, mostly because parts of it may not appear. With the government shutdown under way and the October jobs report already cancelled, the September consumer price index currently pencilled in for 14 October is the next major inflation reading on the schedule, and its timing depends on the shutdown being resolved.

Beyond that, the Treasury continues its regular bill and note auctions, a live read on demand for US government debt at these yields. Federal Reserve speakers remain frequent and audibly split: Dallas Fed president Lorie Logan argued on Friday that policy has been "offsides" and called for a rate rise regardless of the jobs data, while governor Michelle Bowman said she saw no urgent need for further moves this year. The next scheduled decision from the Federal Open Market Committee — the Fed's rate-setting body — is on 27-28 October, with the announcement due at 14:00 ET on the Wednesday.