The main equity indexes were down again on Tuesday, as oil prices pulled back but bond yields continued to reflect concerns about energy costs and inflationary pressures, as well as economic growth and government debt. At the same time, investors, traders and speculators can look forward to a seasonally strong period for the stock market.
At the closing bell, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite had slipped 0.09% to 26,797, the S&P 500 was down 0.8% at 7,683, and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen 0.7% to 51,481.
The front-month West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures contract was down 3.7% to $89.21 per barrel. Front-month Brent crude oil futures, the global benchmark, dipped 1.9% to $95.95.
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But the 30-year Treasury yield was up for a sixth straight trading session, rising 2.5 basis points to 5.587% and crossing above 5.61% for the first time since 2002. Both the 2-year Treasury yield (-3.5 bps, 4.889%) and the 10-year Treasury yield (+0.9 bps, 5.251%) also reached new 52-week highs before pulling back on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index declined for a third straight month to its lowest level since April 2014. A print of 81.9 for September was well below a consensus forecast for an increase to 89.0 from a revised 88.6 in August.
“Concerns about sustained inflation, high gas prices, and job scarcity likely contributed to the overall decline,” Barclays economist Pooja Sriram concludes.
It’s not all doom-and-gloom, though. “The fourth quarter is seasonally strong,” Louis Navellier of Navellier & Associates observes, “and the third year of a presidential election cycle is also the strongest year in the four-year presidential term.”
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At the same time, Navellier acknowledges, “Investors might be asking, aren’t higher interest rates and Fed key rate hikes going to derail the stock market?” It depends, of course: “The answer is no for growth stocks, which have beaten value stocks for 12 consecutive years.”
From a broader level, Navellier explains that relatively strong GDP growth in the U.S. sets it apart from other markets where interest rates are also rising, such as Japan, the UK and France.
“Their underlying government debt might only be fixed with more money printing,” Navellier says, amid a “staggering” $365 trillion in global government debt.
FICO falls another 27%
With the durability of its software business in question for many months, Fair Isaac (FICO) had already lost more than half of its market cap from the end of 2025 through the closing bell on Monday.
FICO extended its decline by another 26.6% and was the worst performing S&P 500 stock on Tuesday after U.S. Federal Housing Director Bill Pulte formalized a plan to bring competition to the government-sponsored mortgage market.
“We are Simplifying Mortgage Pricing following feedback from lenders and consumers,” Pulte wrote on X. “Instead of two separate pricing grids, which makes zero sense, Fannie and Freddie are hereby moving to ONE PRICING GRID with VantageScore joining the existing FICO Classic pricing grid.”
Pulte posted earlier in September that since 2020 “FICO has increased the price per a person’s credit score by 1,800%. FICO has enjoyed a monopoly. No more.”
Indeed, price action for what S&P Global considers a tech stock reflects threats from the federal government, as well as competitive pressure on its software business from artificial intelligence (AI).
Anthropic is talking about huge numbers
The prospectus for its upcoming IPO shows Anthropic plans to spend $518 billion to build out its AI infrastructure in coming years, as Reuters reported after the closing bell on Monday.
Anthropic recorded a net loss of $42 billion and an operating loss of $8 billion in 2025, as revenue expanded by 12 times to almost $4.6 billion. The company had approximately $20.3 billion in cash as of December 31.
Anthropic used 48 pages of its 261-page prospectus to describe its operations, and another 80 to explain risk factors, such as “existential risks to humanity” represented by AI.
Though Anthropic continues to release model updates, CEO Dario Amodei has appealed to other AI developers to exercise a little more caution as they deploy new capabilities.
Reuters reports that an IPO for the AI lab is not expected to happen until after the November midterm elections. The prospectus confirms Anthropic will seek a $2 trillion IPO valuation.
