“
Stop making sense,” the Talking Heads once sang. The stock market took it literally on Thursday with
a massive rally following an
inflation reading that everyone agreed was way too hot. So what gives?
There’s no dismissing September’s consumer price index. The CPI rose 0.4% in September, up from 0.1% in August, and above estimates for 0.2%. Core consumer prices, which don’t include food and energy, rose 0.6%, above forecasts for 0.4%, and unchanged from August. CPI rose 8.2% year over year, down a tick from 8.3%, but core CPI climbed 6.6%, from 6.3%. Other than
car and apparel prices falling, there was little in the report that inflation was anywhere near tamed.
The immediate reaction was predictable. All three indexes, which had been up solidly ahead of the print, tumbled, with the
Nasdaq Composite down more than 3%, while the
S&P 500 fell as much as 2.4%, to 3491.58. The S&P 500, though, finished the day up 2.6%, while the Nasdaq rose 2.2%, and the
Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 2.8%.
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It was a massive rally, and one that came out of nowhere. And it’s left market observers like yours truly wondering what the heck just happened. There wasn’t any new data, no headline-making speeches, no event that occurred just after the open to spur such a move. It literally came out of nowhere—and left us grasping for possible reasons. “Today’s market reversal was a head-scratcher,” writes Oanda’s Edward Moya. And he’s not wrong.