A note from our founder
Two things this week were worth the measuring.
The first is the 10-year Treasury yield, which closed Friday at 5.24%. Over the last 504 weeks, Friday closes at or above 5.20% have happened exactly twice. Both were in the last fortnight.
The second is an argument going around about whether the market is in a bubble, and where. I went looking for a way to test it rather than agree with it, and found one quarter that makes the question concrete. It is below.
Everything in this email is measured from closing prices, with the window named. Where something is uncertain, it says so.
Chart of the week: a profit line and a cash line that stopped matching
A well-followed argument this weekend held that if there is a bubble, it is not in the price but in the earnings. That is testable, so here is the cleanest case I could find.
Most of Alphabet's ($GOOGL) June-quarter pre-tax profit came from its equity stakes, not its operations. Of $139bn in pre-tax income, $99bn was gains on equity investments. That accounting is required by GAAP and entirely ordinary. It is also not operating profit, and operating profit grew 30.4% - a real number, but an ordinary one next to the headline.
Over the same quarter, free cash flow went to -$5.9bn, from +$5.3bn a year earlier, because capital spending outran the cash coming in.
So the profit line roughly quadrupled while the business consumed cash. Neither figure is wrong, and one company does not make a market. But it shows exactly how far a headline profit number can travel from the cash underneath it, which is the thing worth watching if you believe earnings are where the risk sits.
Where things stand
Levels are Friday closes against each stock's own moving averages.
- S&P 500 ETF ($SPY): $778.57, up 1.16% on the week, above both its 50- and 200-day averages. That is the 11th consecutive Friday close above its 50-day; the last one below was 24 July.
- Nasdaq-100 ETF ($QQQ): $751.27, up 0.23%, above both averages.
- US 10-year: 5.24%, down from 5.28% the Friday before, and above both averages. Two Friday closes at or above 5.20% in 504 weeks, and they are the last two.
- Bitcoin: $82,912, down 3.35% on the week and above both averages, but 33.5% below its closing peak of $124,753 on 5 October 2025 - a year and four days earlier.
The week's movers
New this issue: the board now runs Friday close to Friday close off our own watchlist, rather than a single session. One week, one list each way.
Up: $NU +20.0%, $ZS +18.9%, $MRNA +18.4%, $CEG +15.8%, $VST +15.3%.
Down: $IREN -15.7%, $ASTS -12.8%, $AMKR -12.3%, $INTC -12.3%, $TER -10.3%.
Measured from each name's own 2 October and 9 October closes, across 168 companies above $10bn on the watchlist as it stood on 9 October. The watchlist grows during the week, and names are sometimes added because they moved, so treat this as a board of what we were watching, not a screen of a fixed universe.
What the charts did after we posted them
We publish levels on charts during the week, so at the end of it we check them. Five from Monday to Wednesday:
- $VST cleared its 200-day and closed the week above it, finishing up 15.3%.
- $WMT stayed inside its August earnings gap but closed back above the 23 September high we had drawn at $111.23.
- $NRG kept the gain it made the day we posted it but finished under its 50-day at $113.33, so the level it was marked against did not clear.
- $ASTS was marked on a rare close above its 50-day. It was back below the next session and ended the week down 12.8%.
- $IREN finished below both levels on its chart. Nothing on it held.
Two held, $VST and $WMT, and three did not. The record stays up either way, at yieldterminalpro.com/levels.
This week's stock reviews
One company a day, same format each time: what the business actually earns, what the price implies, and where the stock sits on its own chart.
- Intel ($INTC) - the TSMC ($TSM) talks and the foundry question.
- Cerebras ($CBRS) - the inference boom is real; the earnings test is not finished.
- Caterpillar ($CAT) - the power story improved, the multiple moved first.
- GE Aerospace ($GE) - earnings grew and the stock gave back its 2026 gain.
- Cameco ($CCJ) - nuclear growth, a broken trend, and 101.6x trailing adjusted earnings.
- CrowdStrike ($CRWD) - securing the AI buildout at a demanding price.
- TeraWulf ($WULF) - the delivery test for its AI buildout.
Comparisons worth opening
- AT&T ($T) stock vs. its own 2033 bond - the bond is a defined income contract, the stock is a claim on what is left. The clearest way to see what you are actually buying.
- Alibaba ($BABA) vs. Amazon ($AMZN) - Amazon has the stronger operating evidence and price momentum right now.
- NexGen ($NXE) vs. Cameco ($CCJ) - what separates them is delivery, timing, and how much of the eventual outcome is already in the price.
The week ahead: October 12-16
Q3 bank season starts. Sixteen companies are on our earnings page for the week: six large caps before Tuesday's open, four of them banks, with JPMorgan ($JPM) releasing at about 7:00am ET, ASML ($ASML) Wednesday, and TSMC ($TSM) early Thursday.
The split on that slate is worth seeing before the numbers land. None of the eleven banks and brokers reporting is up more than 10% this year - Citigroup ($C) leads them at +9.2%, Wells Fargo ($WFC) trails at -12.2%. The two chipmakers reporting the same week are up 53% and 42%. Same market, same quarter, two very different years.
Five of those sixteen report dates were confirmed on the company's own investor-relations page. The rest are vendor dates and are labelled as such, because a calendar entry is a lead, not a fact.
Three things of our own that are close enough to be worth measuring:
- The 10-year. A third consecutive Friday close above 5.20% would make a two-week event into something harder to call noise.
- $SPY's streak. Eleven straight Friday closes above the 50-day. The average is at $767.57 and rising, so the test gets closer each week the index stalls.
- The AI-infrastructure split. Last week the megacaps rose while $CRWV, $NBIS and $IREN fell hard. Our weekly AI debt check marks both legs on the same date.
New on the site
Three things went up this week that were not there last Sunday.
The Insider Analyzer reads SEC Form 4 filings and puts reported insider purchases and sales next to the share price, with a CSV export. Two details make it more honest than most insider trackers: the markers sit on that day's closing price rather than pretending to know the execution price, and it counts how many filings reference a trading plan - which is the difference between a decision and a schedule. Run Meta ($META) through it and the six-month total is $0 of purchases against roughly $131m of sales, almost all of it plan-referenced.
The earnings week page now carries a chart for every company reporting, and labels each report date as either confirmed with the company or taken from a vendor calendar. Five of next week's sixteen are confirmed.
The levels record keeps every chart level we publish and what the price did afterwards, including the ones that did not work. This week's scoreline is in the section above.
Free tools
The Claim Checker tests posted trading rules against simply holding. Of 124 rules checked so far, 2 beat buy-and-hold.
The covered call and cash-secured put calculators are free and need no signup.
Every weekend we post a board of what is still trading while the exchanges are shut - commodities, index and single-stock perpetual futures, and crypto - because it is the only live read on those markets until Monday.
Educational commentary only. Not investment advice. Prices are closing prices as of Friday 9 October 2026 unless stated otherwise.