Stock Market Today: Nasdaq Closes Up 1.09 Percent as Chips Bounce — the Dow Falls, and the Week Still Belongs to the Sellers
The bounce was real and it was not enough. The Nasdaq Composite closed up 1.09 percent at 24,579.42 and the S&P 500 added 0.31 percent at 7,376.86, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 237.33 points, or 0.46 percent, to 51,285.73 — a split close that left every major index down for the week after Thursday's rout.
Wall Street closed the week the way it traded the day: in two directions at once. The Nasdaq Composite rose 1.09 percent to 24,579.42 and the S&P 500 added 0.31 percent to 7,376.86, both well off their session highs, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 237.33 points, or 0.46 percent, to 51,285.73. The Russell 2000 rose 0.89 percent to 2,754.11 and the VIX fear gauge fell 9.23 percent to 25.58 — anxiety cooled, even as the Dow stayed red.
What bounced was what had been beaten. Chip stocks recovered part of Thursday's losses — the semiconductor fund SMH rose 3.62 percent, AMD jumped 11.04 percent and Nvidia added 2.78 percent in the closing reads — a day after the Nasdaq fell more than 5 percent in its biggest one-day point drop ever and the Dow shed some 1,800 points. Earnings did the rest of the sorting: companies that raised their outlooks, among them JFrog, Cloudflare and Airbnb, jumped by double digits at midday, while companies that cut guidance were punished — DraftKings down about 27 percent at midday and Axon down 18.18 percent at the close after a quarterly miss and a reduced 2026 revenue outlook.
The counterweight never moved. October payrolls rose 165,000, far above forecasts, and unemployment fell to 4.1 percent — the report filed this morning as SQ-20261106-025 — pushing the 10-year Treasury yield to 4.859 percent and keeping a December Federal Reserve rate hike as the market's base case. The reads put the priced odds in a range, not a point: about 70 percent in the CME FedWatch figure cited by CNBC's evening report, and 78 to 79 percent in two other closing reads — up sharply from Thursday on every version.
The week is the verdict the day could not overturn. The S&P 500 fell 2.7 percent for the week, its biggest weekly decline since April 2025; the Nasdaq fell 3.4 percent and the Dow 0.9 percent, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have now fallen for four consecutive weeks. Next week brings the test that decides whether Friday's bounce was a floor or a pause: the October consumer price index on Tuesday, November 10. This desk's close supersedes every intraday file it published today.
