Fuel Prices Fell On A Russian Diesel Deal And A Ceasefire Nobody Confirmed

Fuel prices fell on Monday after President Trump announced a deal with Russia to raise diesel supply, then said Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an energy ceasefire that neither side confirmed. The six largest U.S. banks open earnings season on Tuesday, and September's inflation reading lands the day after. In Beijing, China's securities regulator called in its listed companies after a bruising quarter for technology shares.

Fast Facts

• Traders put only an 18% chance on a Federal Reserve rate increase this month, against 85% by December, and expect increases in Europe, Japan and the United Kingdom too (Read More)
• Amazon is in talks to buy the artificial-intelligence startup Decart for around $7 billion (Read More)
• The Justice Department is investigating five television networks over their suspension of White House pool coverage, citing possible violations of antitrust law (Read More)
• American stock exchanges run a normal 9:30am to 4:00pm session today, while the U.S. bond market is closed all day for Columbus Day (Read More)
• Shares in the data-center operator Iren jumped 5% before the opening bell on a report of an artificial-intelligence cloud deal with Anthropic (Read More)
• Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack says companies' ability to keep raising prices, plus a sturdy economy, shows rates are not yet high enough to bring inflation down (Read More)

Global News

• India's central bank moved to pull cash out of the banking system, selling 250 billion rupees of bonds and raising the daily reserves banks must hold to 99% from 90%; its benchmark 2036 government bond returned 7.3707% in Mumbai on Monday, the most in three years (Read More)
• Sweden's Telia will cut 900 jobs, about 6.4% of its 14,100 staff, to save $100 million a year, all of it before year end (Read More)
• Apple chief executive Tim Cook began a China visit on Monday, with signals on demand for the newest iPhone there still mixed (Read More)
• Australia and New Zealand joined the United States, Canada, Britain, South Korea and Japan in warning citizens against travelling to Saudi Arabia, after five attacks on Saudi airports in under a week (Read More)

A Diesel Deal With Moscow, And A Ceasefire Claim Neither Side Confirmed, Pulled Fuel Prices Down

President Trump announced on Friday that he had reached a deal with Russia to increase the supply of diesel to the United States and global markets, including a waiver on some U.S. energy sanctions. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the same day that lifting those sanctions unilaterally "looks like a happy birthday present for Putin." A U.S. official said Trump moved after Zelensky ignored repeated requests to stop attacking Russian oil refineries. On Sunday Trump said on Truth Social that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an energy ceasefire. Neither side confirmed it, and Reuters reported Monday that there was "considerable confusion" about the announcement.

Fuel prices moved anyway. Brent crude futures, which fix a price now for oil delivered on a set date later, opened higher on Monday and then slipped 1.1% to $103.50 a barrel, down from a recent top of $109.97. U.S. crude lost 1.2% to $90.73, both in early trading. European government bonds followed the fuel. Germany's 10-year yield, the annual return an investor earns for lending to the German government, fell 2.5 basis points to 3.46%, a basis point being one hundredth of a percentage point. The extra return investors demand for lending to France rather than Germany narrowed to 136.50 basis points from 158.67 earlier this month.

Diesel is why a fuel headline reaches a grocery bill. It moves freight, meaning trucks, trains, ships and farm equipment, which makes its price an input cost buried inside almost every physical good on a shelf. So a change in diesel supply does not stay inside the energy market. It works its way, with a lag, into the prices a consumer price index measures, and bonds sit downstream of the same expectation, because part of what any lender charges is compensation for inflation shrinking the money repaid later. Cheaper fuel trims that compensation.

What the move rests on is contested. Senators in both parties have called the plan potentially illegal, Reuters reported Monday, and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, said Saturday he would force a House vote on blocking Russian oil purchases. The supply risk on the other side has not moved. A Houthi attack on Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport on Saturday killed at least 12 people and wounded about 300, the kingdom's deadliest in more than a decade according to Saudi officials. It was the fifth attack on Saudi airports in under a week.

Sources: Axios on the deal · Axios on Zelensky · Axios on Fitzpatrick · Reuters on prices · Reuters on bonds · WSJ · Al Jazeera · Rapunzl on the G7 fuel release

Four In Ten S&P 500 Companies Are Down This Year, And This Week Tests The Rest

The S&P 500 is up 14% in 2026 and sitting at record highs. More than four in ten of the companies inside it are lower this year, which is over 200 companies, and the median member, the middle one with half the index above it and half below, has gained barely 4%, according to a Reuters analysis of LSEG data published Monday. This is also the week the index's two biggest scheduled tests land: the six largest U.S. banks report third-quarter results on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the September consumer price index arrives Wednesday at 8:30am ET, one of the last major releases before the Federal Reserve's October 27-28 meeting.

Those two facts fit together through the arithmetic of what an index is. The S&P 500 is a weighted average, so each company moves the number in proportion to its market value rather than its percentage gain. Energy is the year's best sector at 42% and contributes less than one percentage point of the index's rise; technology is up 32% and contributes more than ten. Nvidia alone has added almost two percentage points, with more than a point each from Apple, Micron and Advanced Micro Devices, while Tesla's 15% dip has taken about 0.3 points back out. That is how 200 falling companies and a handful of very large rising ones net out to a record.

"Anything outside of the AI trade or companies that benefit from higher energy prices face huge headwinds," said Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird. The gap matters most to someone who owns the whole index through one fund, which holds the few big winners and the 200 losers together. Banks go first because their results read across to consumer spending and lending conditions, and they arrive after a rough month, with the S&P 500 banks index down 7.5% over four weeks as Treasury yields climbed. The 10-year note yielded around 5.24% late on Friday, the last session before Monday's bond-market holiday, after touching its highest level in 24 years. Forecasters expect September consumer prices rose 0.6% on the month and 3.7% over the year, while the core measure, which strips out food and energy because those two swing hardest, is expected at 0.2% and 2.5% against the Fed's 2% target. Those are expectations, not results.

Sources: Reuters on breadth · Reuters week ahead · Economic Times · BLS · U.S. Treasury · Rapunzl on the record close

China's Securities Regulator Called In Its Listed Companies After A 12% Quarter

China's top securities regulator spent Saturday in a room with the companies it regulates. The China Securities Regulatory Commission convened a symposium in Beijing on October 10, bringing executives from listed companies together with securities-firm and fund-manager experts to "discuss the country's capital markets and financial conditions," according to an online statement. Its head, Wu Qing, chaired it and asked for views, which the South China Morning Post reads as fresh support for the A-share market, meaning the shares that trade on the mainland exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen. It follows a sell-off in Chinese technology shares that the paper attributes to concerns over U.S. sanctions. The CSI 300, a basket of mainland share prices compressed into one number, fell 12% in the third quarter, dragged down by a 31% slump in the technology-heavy Star Market 50.

Notice what this is and what it is not. A regulator calling in the companies it oversees commits no money and changes no rule; it tells the market that officials are paying attention. A policy is a different object: written down, funded and lived with. The gap between the two is the thing to watch. Monday showed how far the same technology trade reaches past the mainland. South Korean stocks fell 1.1% and MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was little changed, in thin trade with Japan's markets shut and the U.S. on a partial holiday. Reuters put that caution down to earnings season, high technology valuations and choppy oil after strikes on Gulf shipping and airports, not to anything out of Beijing. Micron Technology traded about 2.2% lower at $1,006.20 before the opening bell, on what Investing.com called reports of progress on a next-generation DRAM design, DRAM being the working memory inside phones and laptops, at China's ChangXin Memory Technologies. No originating source for those reports is named.

Sources: SCMP · Reuters on Asia · Investing.com · WSJ

What To Watch

JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Citigroup are expected before Tuesday's open, with Johnson & Johnson and UnitedHealth. The average analyst estimate, an expectation and not a result, has JPMorgan at $5.94 a share against $5.07 a year earlier, Goldman Sachs at $12.90 against $12.25 and Citigroup at $2.66 against $2.24. Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock follow on Wednesday.

Wednesday also brings the September consumer price index at 8:30am ET and the Federal Reserve's Beige Book, its survey of business conditions across the twelve Fed districts, at 2:00pm. Producer prices follow Thursday, import and export prices Friday.

Fed officials are out all week: Governor Christopher Waller in New Delhi on Tuesday, Michelle Bowman twice in Bangkok on Wednesday, and Chair Kevin Warsh with the head of the International Monetary Fund on Thursday. The committee meets October 27 and 28.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which builds the chips Nvidia and Apple design, is expected Thursday before the open at $4.45 a share against $2.92.

The Classroom Takeaway

A record index level and the companies inside it turned out to be two different stories on Monday: one number up 14%, and more than 200 of its members down. You cannot see that from the headline, only from the individual figures underneath it, which is what a page of real market data is for.