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Dow Notches Strongest Month of Trading Since 1976

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Often times when we have big news weeks in the world of the stock market — and this week counts, with 1600+ earnings reports plus a slew of economic data all on deck — we don’t start off hot right away. This is one of those weeks. Only Chicago PMI is out this morning for economic prints (slightly lower than expected), with some important — but not necessarily key — Q3 earnings.

Take NXP Semiconductor (NXPI - Free Report) , for instance: it comes from the very important, and struggling, semiconductor manufacturing industry, but at $40 billion in market cap it’s only slightly more than half the size of a company like Analog Devices (ADI - Free Report) . This afternoon, Q3 earnings for NXP missed expectations — $2.79 per share versus $3.66 in the Zacks consensus — on sales that slightly outperformed expectations to $3.45 billion, or roughly +20% year over year. The company cited weakness in the macro consumer business, and shares are -1% in late trading.

Overall, though, October turned out to be a terrific month for the blue-chip Dow index. At +11% since the end of September, including today’s mild -0.39% sell-off, it’s the best October on record and the strongest single-month of trading since the U.S. Bicentennial. For the S&P 500, we saw its best trading month since July at over +5%, even with 10 of 11 sectors trading lower on the last day of the month (only Energy was up). In short, it was a strong bounce-back month from a September that stank to high heaven.

For the Nasdaq in October, we still closed in positive territory, +1.6%, though the tech-heavy index has a long way to go until it’s back to the start of the year -- even further to reach its all-time highs notched in November of last year. The Nasdaq is -30% year to date and an intimidating -6K points from its November highs. Companies like Meta (META - Free Report) and Tesla (TSLA - Free Report) were no help this month, trading down -31% and -14%, respectively.

Tuesday brings us a fresh month, as well as earnings reports from Big Pharma staples Pfizer (PFE - Free Report) and Lilly (LLY - Free Report) , Mondelez (MDLZ - Free Report) , Sysco Foods (SYY - Free Report) , Airbnb (ABNB - Free Report) and Uber (UBER - Free Report) , to name just a few. We’ll also see PMI and ISM Manufacturing for October, JOLTS for September, Construction Spending and Motor Vehicle Sales. This ought to hold us until Wednesday’s ADP (ADP - Free Report) jobs report and the Fed’s latest rate hike.

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