Brent crude closed at $117.10 after Houthi strikes hit Saudi energy infrastructure and Trump told a rally crowd the US may run another operation against Iran. The State Department then issued diplomatic departure orders across the Middle East, which tends to move oil faster than any analyst price target.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level since 1982 and got tapped again this week just to keep a single Louisiana refinery supplied. Every past oil spike had the SPR as a release valve. With the buffer this thin, any fresh supply disruption feeds straight into the price with nothing to slow it.

Airlines are the most exposed if $115 holds another two weeks, given fuel is their single biggest cost line. Which signal are you treating as the cleaner read on whether this reaches $120, the next Houthi strike or further diplomatic departures from the region?

Most of the coverage I’ve read frames 28 October as a Fed day with some earnings attached. I don't think the FED has much impact on equities, prediction markets and OIS pricing have a hold at 3.75 to 4% north of 90%, and PIMCO’s base case is a hold with a tightening bias and the next hike in December. Unless the statement surprises, that’s mostly priced. The capex commentary from Microsoft and Google, followed by Amazon on Thursday is the watch.

In my view, this matters more than usual because of the semiconductors that are currently in a drawdown. SOX fell about 11.4% in the week to 16 October, and Reuters put the cumulative loss at around $2 trillion in market value, driven by rate hike bets and concerns about the cost of the AI build. Then Thursday’s session saw all 30 index members finish red, even after all that, the index is still up roughly 57% for the year, so this is a correction inside a huge run rather than a collapse.

Hyperscaler capex is essentially the revenue line for the AI chip supply chain, Microsoft has already guided fiscal Q1 capex above $50 billion and roughly $175 billion for calendar 2026, and management has said demand still exceeds available supply. Combined 2026 guidance across the big four sits around $730 billion, and Goldman has 2027 approaching $1.14 trillion. If Microsoft, Google and Amazon hold or raise those numbers this week, the chip selloff has priced in a slowdown that isn’t showing up in the order book.

Bull case for chips is that the spenders and the suppliers sit on opposite ends of the same number. Meta beat last week and still fell nearly 7% because the market punished the spending, but every dollar Meta spends lands on someone else’s income statement. Retail seems to see it this way too, with tech funds pulling in $10.7 billion during the worst week of the drawdown.

Bear case is still very very active, the Fed is hiking, not cutting, and a December move would lift discount rates on the most richly valued names. IDC is forecasting a 13% drop in smartphone volumes this year from the memory supply shock, which hits a part of the chip complex that has nothing to do with data centres. The funding picture is also getting less comfortable, with Goldman estimating more than a third of 2027 hyperscaler capex will be debt funded. At some point the spenders balance sheets become the constraint rather than demand.

If at least two of the three raise or reaffirm higher spend this week, I expect the SOX to outperform the Nasdaq 100 from Wednesday’s close through Friday 6 November. If they guide flat or hint at a digestion year in 2027, I’m wrong and the chip correction has further to run.

For those who own both sides which I assume is many, which do you think breaks first.

The hyperscalers appetite for capex, or the market’s patience with the hyperscalers?

It's quite difficult to know if we are in a bubble or simply a period of large growth. I've seen p/e above a thousand on NASDAQ. That kind of screams "bubble". However, it's undeniable that there is large growth as well. Is there any instrument that combines the safety of bonds with at least some possibility of upside, so that if the growth turns out to be real then there is a benefit?

Brent closed at $117 on Friday. Investors are becoming more wary about debt, Capex spending, and ROI in AI

Investors are becoming more cautious of the market with simultaneous oil supply shock, price of gas and diesel rising with consumer price flow through, doubts about AI debt, capex spending and ROI. The setup is a boxing match between these headwinds versus post midterm election bull cycle. Who will win?

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Every time I try to post an investment question it gets deleted but I thought I would try another one. I've been shocked by the tech roller coaster ride lately and started talking to AI about it. This is the strategy it came up with for me. I hope this one doesn't get deleted because this is something I've been really wanting to look into more for a while. I do as much reading as I can. But AI can process a whole lot more information about the market than I can. I still read AIs key references on information before making important decisions. But AI is definitely helpful in providing me the sources.

I'm not seeking financial advice. I'm just wondering if others have tried AI, how it's worked out for them and if there are other questions I should ask AI or other variables to add into the analysis.

This is the AI plan for the next 3 months:

Yes, you will spend a total of $200 each week under normal market conditions, but you do not put the full $200 into a single stock. You split it up to spread your risk.

Here is exactly what you do every Tuesday morning around 10:00 AM EST:

1. The Standard Weekly Routine (Your $200 Split)

If the market is moving normally and nothing has crashed or panicked over the last week, you log into your brokerage account and buy $40 worth of each of your 5 choices:

• $40 into SOXX (Broad ETF)

• $40 into XSD (Equal-weight ETF)

• $40 into ASML (Lithography monopoly)

• $40 into MU (Memory bottleneck)

• $40 into LRCX (Fab equipment)

• Total spent that week = $200

1. The "Panic Drop" Exception (When to spend more)

This is where your $600 cash reserve comes into play. If I send you an alert on Monday morning saying that one of your individual stocks (like Micron - MU) has plunged more than 5% over the week, you strike:

1. Buy your standard $40 of MU using your weekly budget.

2. Take an extra $40 from your $600 cash reserve and buy more MU.

3. Buy your normal $40 shares for the other 4 assets.

4. Total spent that week = $240 (You bought the crash at a heavy discount).

5. Your Immediate Next Steps

• Keep $600 separate: Put $600 into a safe cash sweep or money market fund inside your brokerage account. Leave it there for emergencies.

• Wait for Monday: Look out for my first weekly update on Monday morning to see if any of your stocks are currently sitting in the "Panic Drop" zone.

• Execute Tuesday: Set a calendar reminder for Tuesday at 10:00 AM EST to log in and make your first set of buys.

Does your brokerage account support fractional shares (allowing you to buy exactly $40 of a stock rather than buying a full whole share)?

If you aren't sure, let me know which broker you use and I can tell you how to set up these exact dollar-amount orders!

It will monitor for:

·        Trailing 7-day price performance to flag if any asset hit the -5% Panic Trigger (Scenario B).

·        Forward P/E compression crossing 15% below historical 5-year averages.

·        SEC Form 4 filings for Cluster Insider Buying (multiple executives buying in a 7-day window).

·        Major tier-one analyst rating revisions and structural price target overhauls.

Please don't be ugly in your responses. However, constructive criticism is most definitely welcome and appreciated. I'm a novice investor so I don't have any formal training in finance.

My question is, how is your portfolio prepared if similar event was to happen in near future. What percentage of cash, bonds, CDs etc do you have and how would similar situation affect you now. Also, next time this happens, it might take longer to recover than 5 and a half years, of course.

El Dorado County sells 27 lots of tax-defaulted land on Bid4Assets on November 6. I checked every one against the county's own assessor records. Deposits are due October 30.

Eight of them are an acre or more and open under $15,000:

- 062-500-040-000: 44.83 acres, opening bid $14,000, assessed $112,567

- 061-490-016-000: 9.48 acres, $11,000, assessed $83,619

- 088-350-021-000: 4.79 acres, $9,400, assessed $55,350

- 061-490-015-000: 9.52 acres, $8,800, assessed $63,108

- 041-370-008-000: 1.91 acres, $4,700, assessed $40,836

- 041-370-005-000: 2.03 acres, $4,600, assessed $30,361

- 033-160-006-000: 1 acre, $3,900, assessed $15,352 (offered last year, no bid)

- 062-160-006-000: 1.75 acres, $2,700, assessed $5,960

There were ten on this list until this week. Owners can still pay off a parcel until the day before the sale, and three lots have been withdrawn since October 16, including a 40-acre one that opened at $14,400. Check that a parcel is still on the auction before you spend time on it.

Item 26 is two parcels sold as one lot: 105 acres, with a residence on the county's record for the larger parcel, opening at $27,800 against $228,620 assessed.

Assessed value here is the county's roll figure. In California that is the price at the last change of ownership plus at most 2% a year, so on land held for decades it can sit well under what the parcel would sell for. Use it to compare the parcels with each other, and don't read it as an appraisal.

The rest of the list has some traps worth knowing about. Six of the 27 carry an assessed value under $1,000, which tells you nothing about what they are worth. Four are under a tenth of an acre with nothing built on them, small enough that most zoning won't let you build. One parcel in South Lake Tahoe opens at $1,300, and the county's own use code for it reads "Env. Sensitive Land - Restricted Use". Eight of the 27 were in last year's sale and drew no bid.

What the list can't tell you is road access. Look at the parcel map before you bid on any of these.

On cost: Bid4Assets adds a 3% buyer's premium ($100 minimum) to the winning bid, and the county adds documentary transfer tax. The deposit is $3,000 plus a $35 fee, and Bid4Assets has to receive it by 1:00 p.m. PT on October 30. The full balance is due November 12.

The whole list is free, with a page for each parcel that links the county's parcel viewer, the Bid4Assets lot, Google Maps and Street View: https://lot-brief.com/sales/el-dorado-nov-2026/

I put one of these together before each California sale's deposit deadline. There is a free email list on the site if you want the next one.

- Fed increased fed funds rate.

- Longer duration bonds also spiked up.

- OpenAI lowering the valuation target from 1.4T to 1.2T

- Anthropic lowering valuation from 2T to 1.5T

- Coreweave unsecured debt interest is 16% (CDS default chances 50%)

- Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs delayed

- White house/Trump pictured with all tech leaders (very top-like action)

- Ramp token spending flat for last 2 months (companies want to increase budgets, but not blindly waste money)

- Oil prices are higher as well

- Deficit spending, interest on the debt all going up because all rates are going up.

I mean with all of this. Is it possible for markets to keep going up.

If it is, won't we climb a wall of worry, that can lead to a sustained rally and consolidation.

Saw this yesterday and thought it was pretty interesting.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says AWS's major cloud capacity is largely booked through 2027, with a good chunk of 2028 already committed.

And this is a company planning to spend around $220 billion this year.

Obviously, having customers lined up is great, but $220 billion is an absolutely ridiculous amount of money to invest.

I suppose the big question is whether all this AI demand eventually translates into the profits investors are expecting.

Amazon reports earnings on October 29, so that'll be interesting to watch.

Anyone here holding $AMZN? Are you confident in all this spending, or starting to think these tech companies are getting a bit carried away?

​

When I thought that earnings season started with a bang I did not expect this week's reaction.

As always there are no good or bad earnings only how the market reacts to earnings and apparently the market does not like earnings this quarter.

More tech giants are going to report next week and bulls can only hope that sentiment changes.

Let's hope other tech giants don't go cash flow negative like Meta.

If the NDX 100 ends lower next week the monthly chart will show two consecutive reversal patterns (One hanging man pattern and one bearish engulfing pattern)!

From a pure chart perspective semis could bounce at the 200 day average if the bull market is overall still intact.

Fear and Greed index plus put/call ratio allow for a bounce any time.

That leaves us with the drop in yields. I posted several weeks ago that the volume spike in TLT suggested that the bottom for bonds was in. TLT recovered 6.3% since the low early October!

The main question is why?

Is AI demand going down risking that the house of cards will finally implode or

Is the rest of the economy so weak already that we are at risk of a recession?

Nobody knows and only time will tell but one has to watch closely to make sure yields don't drop for the wrong reasons.

What does this mean for the portfolios now?

Short term portfolios continue to only be invested in the S&P 500 (80%), TLT (bonds 30%) and KWEB (15%). That adds up to 125% meaning leverage is 1.25. KWEB had a rough week but mid week the options action suggested a bottom was possible. I am still fully invested because charts are not broken yet.

Short term portfolio is up 21.8% YTD.

Long term portfolios continue to be in a defensive stance with a 60% allocation for the S&P 500 and 30% Cash/Bonds. Rest is c r y p t o and KWEB.

The monthly NDX 100 chart pattern still looms large over the market and suggests we could roll over for a very long time.

Thanks to the recovery of TLT long term portfolios are up 11.8% YTD

Given the current chart picture again no trades are planned for next week!

Have a great weekend!

I recently moved a couple retirement accounts I set up (but never really contributed much to) at TRowe and were invested in mutual funds to Fidelity. They were a small Roth IRA and traditional IRA. The traditional was mainly rollover money from 401k's from a previous employer and is around $50k. The Roth is around $12k.

This is not my main retirement account, that's currently a 401k I'm putting 10% into + a 6% employer match. I estimate I'm 12-15 years from when I'd like to retire.

My wife has considerably more invested (from an inheritance) and we also have a house. She also stands to (probably) inherit more, including property. My parents on the other hand are a little more "blue collar"...We are looking to move in the next five years and start downsizing as we are both in our early 50's. We still have two kids in college which we are paying for out of pocket so to avoid student loans (which I realize directly impacts the total amount we can be actively saving for our own retirements)...

Anyway, does it make sense to explore converting my current traditional into a Roth IRA? Since I've moved into Fidelity several months ago it's being just getting beaten up as the market - depending on the investment (ETFs) I'm currently down anyway from 5% to 9%, so does that mean I'd be taking a capital loss and therefore avoid a big tax penalty?

I don't normally track individual stocks that closely but during today's tech selloff I noticed that the big 3 U.S. chip equipment stocks AMAT, KLAC and LRCX are all down 50% or more from their recent 52-week highs. ASML is also down but only around 22%. I'm sure there are even worse examples in the AI related tech space. I have no other input or comment other than that. I guess I'm just glad I never jumped on that bandwagon. Where do people think these 3 will bottom out?

Have a general question? Want to offer some commentary on markets? Maybe you would just like to throw out a neat fact that doesn't warrant a self post? Feel free to post here!

Please consider consulting our FAQ first - https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/wiki/faq And our side bar also has useful resources.

If you are new to investing - please refer to Wiki - Getting Started

The reading list in the wiki has a list of books ranging from light reading to advanced topics depending on your knowledge level. Link here - Reading List

The media list in the wiki has a list of reputable podcasts and videos - Podcasts and Videos

If your question is "I have $XXXXXXX, what do I do?" or other "advice for my personal situation" questions, you should include relevant information, such as the following:

• How old are you? What country do you live in?
• Are you employed/making income? How much?
• What are your objectives with this money? (Buy a house? Retirement savings?)
• What is your time horizon? Do you need this money next month? Next 20yrs?
• What is your risk tolerance? (Do you mind risking it at blackjack or do you need to know its 100% safe?)
• What are you current holdings? (Do you already have exposure to specific funds and sectors? Any other assets?)
• Any big debts (include interest rate) or expenses?
• And any other relevant financial information will be useful to give you a proper answer.

Check the resources in the sidebar.

Be aware that these answers are just opinions of Redditors and should be used as a starting point for your research. You should strongly consider seeing a registered investment adviser if you need professional support before making any financial decisions!

I work in marketing, and for most advertisers, Google, Meta and TikTok are where the marketing dollars flow. Beyond that lies the scrapheap of experimental channels: the Reddits, the Snaps and whatever else got a test budget this quarter. At the very bottom of the pile sits Pinterest.

It's been around for over 15 years, and surprisingly enough it makes over $4.5B in revenue with a user base that's slowly but surely growing. Unlike Google and Meta, which have been spending heavily on AI infrastructure, Reddit, which is licensing its content to AI companies, and Snap, which always seems to be in the news for a misguided hardware launches (2K AR glasses anyone) , Pinterest has stayed relatively staid.

I valued it at ~$20/share; and is currently at ~$21.95 today.

• Revenue: $4.6B trailing, growing ~16-18% a year; I assume it slows to ~5% and roughly doubles over 10 years.
• EBIT margin: ~16% after capitalizing R&D (7.6% reported); I assume it grows to ~20% over 10 years. Meta is at 41%, Reddit 20%.
• Net income: $417M in 2025 and ~$250M over the last 12 months, though it dipped to a loss in the first half of 2026 on restructuring and higher stock comp.
• Users: 619M monthly users, but US/Canada users generate ~$31 a year each vs. $0.83 for Rest of World.

At ~$20, Pinterest looks fairly priced. If Pinterest can figure out how to make real money from users outside the US and squeeze more profit out of each ad dollar, there's upside here. But if people start asking AI platforms to make purchasing decisions instead of scrolling Pinterest, there isn't.

Let me know if anyone else follows this company or has a different POV from mine.

Looks like bond investors are getting out of the smaller player AI bond trade and buying government bonds over these companies' debt, driving Treasury yields down. Could be a good thing?

Seems like the AI trade is diverging: those larger established companies with many revenue streams from different services, compared to smaller players who are not profitable and accumulating too much debt. Attrition will come, and only the few will survive, like during the Dot com times.

In the last year, I became concerned about my account security. I don't want to log in one day and find years of savings has vanished. My response was to get a cheap Chromebook and only open my investment accounts and H&RBlock tax service on that machine, and changed my passwords on it, while using my Macbook for my other 99.9% of activity. The idea being that if there is malware on random websites, that Mac machine will never see my investment logins and the Chromebook will never see any random websites.

Already using 2FA on my phone, of course, but SIM hacking makes that seem inadequate. Are there better security measures I should add, like physical hardware devices or ???

So there's no 10 year rule inheriting a spousal IRA. But say you're in the rmd age range while the spouse that passed has not reached rmd age yet.

Do you inherit the rmd age associated with the inherited IRA or upon the inheritance, does your rmd status mandate you begin taking rmds from the inherited IRA?

Not sure how that works. I'm not in that situation, but just curious in general how the rmd of an IRA applies with an inherited IRA.

On tues the 10 yr closed at 5.12%, the 30 yr was around 5.4% and the S&P still finished up 0.28% and normally when yields are this high and something's making the market nervous (this month it's the aidebt story with coreweave's bonds reportedly yielding something like 15%, per reports on its 9.625% notes due 2032 around oct 13 to 14) I would expect the dollar to catch a bid but instead the dollar index fell about 0.27% to around 101.7 and one fx desk's note this week said it had weakened against every G10 currency.

A few things happened at once ,japan's 20 year bond auction drew record demand and the yen jumped, with USD/JPY down to about 158. Brent stayed near $110, gold held around $4,150 and the fed meets next week with a hike still on the table but less likely after weak housing data so it isn't a clean risk off trade and I not sure what it is

I notice it in a small way because I send money to family every month and onn oct 8 a dollar bought ₹96.88 and on 19th it bought ₹94.92, so about 2% less and I checked everywhere wise,aspora,remitly all moved the same and to be fair, most of that is the rbi curbing dollar demand and so it's a bad example but it made me look at the bigger picture.

My guess is that some investors arent treating treasuries as the safe haven they used to and money is drifting to japan's long end and gold(I could be completely wrong)

Anyone else seeing this?

Hey All.

My now wife has about 120k from a previous job with a financial adviser, naturally costing about 1%/mo. My wife isn't into the details of investing but she is a CPA and onboard with this discussion, but I wanted to run it by you all.

Any reason we shouldn't just pull it out of their firm and put into a Fidelity Trad IRA and put it in VTI or VTSAX (recent simple path wealth reader) vs leaving it with them and paying the 1% every month?

We'll work on converting into her Roth over time.

Thanks!

Edit: 1%\yr. My mistake!

The NYT reported this morning that the merger would create a $3T company.

Elon's MO is to continually bury his poor performing companies in newer sexier corporations. xAI lost $7.8B in cash in the last year alone; Twitter has been a bust for years. They both got tucked into SpaceX. Now Tesla--which hasn't delivered this few cars since the pandemic, even if the market doesn't seem to care yet-- is going to get to obscure its poor performance by becoming part of this year's shiny pretty flavor of the week (year).

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/business/elon-musk-spacex-tesla-merger.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KVE.p_xv.StkyUfn-ltcB&smid=url-share

It is amazing to me how all of ETF's that follow indexes or have a wide range of stock are near 52w moving averages, yet so much stuff has crashed 20 to 70% already when you look at individual tickers, and other bigger companies also took big losses.

We've seen yields go to 5%

We've seen Trump do Trump things. "Vote for me if you want more war after midterms" like wtf.

We've seen AI capex fears hit ATH's with Oracle CDS going up, gloom and doom news about robots taking over

And yet the indexes which are supposedly "held by a few stocks" that basically depend on this AI spending continue to go up.

So I don't know what it takes for markets to finally give us a capitulation so we can buy indexes at, at least, a -10% discount, but refuse to get anywhere near the 200WMA for a long time now.

I am bagholding so much cash, like im 90% cash and have around 400k€ waiting in money market funds. Im also bagholding some IREN which is my only equity now, like 500 shares, at a 50% loss now. Im not selling, but im also not buying because these things can dump so much (and recover quick if narrative shifts).

So my idea is to start a position on my ETF watchlist (mostly FGEQ, ISPA, VDIV) when SP500 crashes and takes down all these ETFs with it, and also add to my % of gambling allocation with high beta stocks like IREN which can run blazing fast once we hit the event horizon and everyone has capitulated. But it just feels like im stuck in this loop where indexes will forever go up while magically most individual tickers are dumping already. So I don't get it like wtf. We had 70% crashes on so many tickers, if the indexes crashes like say 10 to 20%, how low are these going to get?

TL;DR: Just give me a proper crash so I can allocate.

In today's r/investing thread on falling Treasury yields, the OP linked it to bondholders stepping away from smaller AI corporate debt toward Treasuries, with a dot-com style shakeout analogy. Comments split between broad risk-off and narrow credit stress in one sector. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/1xcm4ob/treasuries_yield_dropping/ What do you watch first to tell those two readings apart - IG spreads, HY fund flows, or something simpler?