SpaceX spectrum deal hits carriers; software leads a higher S&P 500

SpaceX agreed to buy low-band wireless spectrum on Thursday night, and on Friday the three national carriers each lost a tenth or more of their value: T-Mobile fell 13.27%, AT&T 10.82% and Verizon 10.14%, while the S&P 500 rose 0.6% and 77 of the 100 stocks and funds we track rose. Software had its strongest session in weeks as chips fell again, Delta missed and cut its outlook on fuel, and consumer sentiment hit a five-month low. Today the stock market is open but the bond market is closed for Columbus Day; the big banks report Tuesday and September CPI lands Wednesday.

One deal took a tenth off the carriers

After Thursday’s close SpaceX announced an agreement to buy low-band spectrum from Grain Management, a private holder of airwaves, for a service it calls Starlink Mobile. The companies did not disclose terms; the Wall Street Journal reported a price near $8 billion in cash, per Forbes, and the Motley Fool described the licences as 800 MHz low-band spectrum, the kind that travels far and penetrates buildings. That is the detail that matters: paired with Starlink’s satellites, a terrestrial low-band network is the first credible outline of a fourth national carrier that Wall Street has seen in years.

The three were the S&P 500’s largest decliners on the day, per Yahoo Finance. T-Mobile (TMUS) fell 13.27% to $148.58 from $171.31 on 19.0 million shares, the largest decline among the 100 names we track. AT&T (T) fell 10.82% to $22.18 from $24.87 on 150.4 million shares, which Forbes put at roughly 182% above its three-month average, and Verizon (VZ) fell 10.14% to $41.65 from $46.35 on 95.1 million shares. Some press reports quoted smaller declines of 8.75% for Verizon and 9.81% for AT&T; our figures are close-to-close from the licensed feed and agree with each stock’s previous close, so we are using them. All three had risen on Thursday, so the fall came off a local high. After hours there was no bounce: T-Mobile was quoted at $148.76, AT&T at $22.24 and Verizon at $41.81.

The bear case is simple: the carriers were priced as an oligopoly in which the cost of building a network kept new entrants out, and a company with its own rockets, its own satellites and now its own spectrum does not face that barrier in the usual way. The counter-argument came from AT&T chief executive John Stankey, who has said direct-to-cell satellite service is “solving the last 2%, not trying to come up with a new way to solve the 98%”, per Forbes. Both can be true for a while. The deal still needs regulatory approval, and building out a terrestrial network takes years; what changed on Friday is that the market stopped treating the question as hypothetical.

One connected move cut the other way. American Tower (AMT) rose 9.30% to $182.24 from $166.73 on 8.5 million shares, its sixth straight gain, per Trefis. Quiver Quant attributed it to a rotation back into rate-sensitive REITs, and Barclays reiterated an Overweight rating the same day; a fourth national network would also need somewhere to hang its antennas, which is the reading implied by at least one headline. We could not confirm a single catalyst, so treat the connection as plausible rather than proven.

Software was bought and chips were sold, again

Thursday’s selling was about OpenAI’s revenue; Friday’s buying was too. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI told investors it expects annualized revenue to reach or exceed $70 billion by the end of 2026, per Yahoo Finance, which closed the gap the Financial Times had opened a day earlier between a roughly $50 billion net figure and the $70 billion gross one. The names most tied to OpenAI’s spending recovered first. Oracle (ORCL) rose 4.21% to $141.40 from $135.69 on 25.5 million shares, regaining most of Thursday’s 5.48% loss; Mizuho added it to its top-picks list the same day, per TradingKey. Amazon (AMZN) rose 3.29% to $262.43 from $254.06 and Microsoft (MSFT) 2.38% to $535.07 from $522.61.

The rest of the software complex went with them, and the gains were large for a day the index rose only 0.6%. Snowflake (SNOW) rose 7.42% to $368.89 from $343.40 on 8.0 million shares after putting its Agentic Marketplace Discovery into public preview, per Invezz, which also relayed JPMorgan’s view that the software recovery can continue as third-quarter earnings show AI demand for infrastructure software. Datadog (DDOG) rose 7.11% to $293.26, Cloudflare (NET) 5.57% to $360.93, Palantir (PLTR) 5.17% to $209.05 on 37.5 million shares, Palo Alto Networks (PANW) 5.09%, CrowdStrike (CRWD) 4.57%, MongoDB (MDB) 3.93%, Shopify (SHOP) 3.82% and Cisco (CSCO) 3.05%. In the movers feed, Fastly (FSLY) rose 15.93% to $29.33 on 15.2 million shares after an Oppenheimer upgrade to Outperform and a content-delivery agreement with Comcast and NBCUniversal, per GuruFocus and Yahoo Finance, and DigitalOcean (DOCN) rose 8.86% to $134.84.

The semiconductors did not join. Arm (ARM) fell 3.27% to $266.28 from $275.29, extending Thursday’s 6.48% drop; Intel (INTC) fell 2.22% to $104.70, AMD (AMD) 2.03% to $608.10 and Texas Instruments (TXN) 1.55%. Nvidia (NVDA) fell 0.52% to $229.28 and Micron (MU) 0.66% to $1,029.00, both having bounced intraday on the Bloomberg report before fading, per Yahoo Finance; Broadcom (AVGO) rose 0.39%. The technology fund XLK still rose 0.51%, because software outweighed chips, and the Nasdaq-100 fund QQQ rose 0.49%. Apple (AAPL) fell 1.11% to $336.64, the only megacap down on the day, with its supplier Luxshare sliding in Shenzhen this morning, per Investing.com; we found no US-side cause.

That rotation did not stop at the US border. South Korea’s Kospi fell 3.65% to 6,384.24 today, its fourth straight loss and its largest since September 2, with Samsung Electronics down 4.39% and SK Hynix 4.52% despite Samsung’s record quarterly earnings, per the Korea Times, which quoted a Mirae Asset analyst tying the drop to renewed AI-bubble worries after the OpenAI reports. Foreign investors sold a net 2.02 trillion won. Korea JoongAng Daily added oil and Middle East tensions to the list of causes, and a Hana Securities analyst pointed to semiconductor ETF rebalancing, so the explanation is contested; the size of the move is not.

Delta missed, sentiment fell, and the index still finished the week higher

The S&P 500 closed at 7,811.54, up 0.6% on the day and 1.2% for the week, close to the record set on Tuesday; the Dow closed at 51,654.95, up 0.8% and 0.9% for the week; and the Nasdaq Composite closed at 27,366.17, up 0.6% for a fourth straight weekly gain, per the AP. The Russell 2000 rose 0.5% on Friday but fell 0.9% for the week, the one major index to lose ground. In our feed the S&P 500 fund SPY rose 0.60%, the Dow fund DIA 0.87%, and the small-cap fund IWM 0.49%. The 10-year Treasury yield finished at 5.24%, up about 2 basis points, and the 2-year at 4.80%, per etftrends.

Delta Air Lines reported adjusted earnings of $1.72 a share against estimates of $1.75 to $1.82 depending on the provider, its first miss in two years, on record adjusted revenue of $17.6 billion, up 16% on flat capacity, per CNBC and Yahoo Finance. Adjusted fuel costs rose 62% to $4.14 billion, an average of $3.61 a gallon, and the company cut its full-year adjusted earnings outlook to $5.10 to $5.60 a share from $6.50 to $7.50; asked what drove the cut, the chief financial officer said “All of it’s fuel.” Chief executive Ed Bastian said demand remains strong and that fares keep ticking up as the airline passes along much of a $6 billion annual fuel increase. The shares dipped at the open and flattened by the close. The read-across is that an airline with record revenue can still lose about a quarter of its earnings outlook to oil above $100, and that it is choosing to grow capacity 2% anyway.

The University of Michigan’s preliminary October consumer sentiment index fell to 46.3 from 48.1, below the 47.6 Bloomberg consensus and the lowest since May; the current-conditions index fell to 44.7 from 50.9, a record low for that series, and inflation expectations rose for a second month. Against that, the staples that rose on Thursday gave some back: PepsiCo (PEP) fell 1.85% to $125.97 after Thursday’s 3.73% gain, and Starbucks (SBUX) fell 2.64%. Healthcare and payments led the defensive side instead: UnitedHealth (UNH) rose 2.25%, Merck (MRK) 2.26%, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) 1.93%, the healthcare fund XLV 1.58%, Visa (V) 2.76% and Mastercard (MA) 2.50%. The banks rose into their reports: Wells Fargo (WFC) gained 1.85%, Goldman Sachs (GS) 1.44%, Morgan Stanley (MS) 1.38%, Bank of America (BAC) 1.32%, Citigroup (C) 1.22% and JPMorgan (JPM) 0.47%, with the financial fund XLF up 0.92%. The gold fund GLD rose 1.57% to $384.58, with spot gold up about 1.8% to $4,183, per USAGOLD, and the long-dated Treasury fund TLT rose 0.14%.

Movers: Humana’s star ratings and Moderna’s index debut

Humana (HUM) rose 11.48% to $431.80 on 5.0 million shares after saying 95% of its Medicare Advantage members will be in plans rated four stars or higher for 2027, per GuruFocus. Star ratings set the bonus payments Medicare pays insurers, so a jump of that size is a direct read on 2027 margins, and it is the likeliest reason UnitedHealth rose 2.25% on the same day. Moderna (MRNA) rose 14.09% to $224.98 on 28.9 million shares, a 52-week high; it joined the Nasdaq-100 before Friday’s open, replacing Warner Bros. Discovery, and the New York Times reported that the National Institutes of Health is planning a national cancer-vaccine development programme, per GuruFocus and the Motley Fool. The company’s melanoma vaccine data with Merck is due at the ESMO congress, per TradingKey. Novavax (NVAX) rose 15.82% to $12.74 and Vaxcyte (PCVX) 9.77%; we could not confirm company-specific news for either, and the simplest reading is that the vaccine group moved together.

Elsewhere in the feed, Coinbase (COIN) rose 4.30% to $179.39 and Affirm (AFRM) 4.60%, reversing two days of losses, Alibaba (BABA) rose 5.36% to $111.37, Roblox (RBLX) 5.65% and Tesla (TSLA) 2.05% to $382.70. On the downside, Rivian (RIVN) fell 2.58%, Netflix (NFLX) 1.77% and Home Depot (HD) 1.60%, giving back half of Thursday’s 3.39% gain.

Overnight: Korea down, Europe up, oil lower on an unconfirmed ceasefire

Japan’s market was closed for Sports Day, which thinned Asian trading. Beyond Korea’s 3.65% fall, mainland China’s CSI 300 closed 0.68% lower and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.76%, per CNBC. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 was up 0.43% at 634.25 by 07:09 GMT, with Spain’s bank-heavy IBEX up 1.3%, per Reuters via Business Recorder; shortly after the open CNBC had Italy’s FTSE MIB up 1.21%, Germany’s DAX 0.40%, the FTSE 100 0.38% and France’s CAC 40 0.33%. Eurozone bond yields eased. LVMH reports after the European close.

Oil is lower. Brent crude for December was down 0.77% at $103.91 a barrel and WTI for November down 1.26% at $90.69, per CNBC, after President Trump posted on Sunday that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an energy ceasefire “effective immediately”, alongside a deal under which he said Moscow would supply more than 4 million tons of diesel to the global market. Neither government has confirmed the agreement: President Zelenskyy said he was waiting to see details, Moscow did not comment, and Ukrainian officials reported a Russian strike on a power plant in Kharkiv after the announcement. Trump announced a similar energy ceasefire in mid-September that neither side confirmed. Attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis continued, which is why Brent remains above $100 even on the dip. S&P 500 futures were up about 0.3% in Yahoo Finance’s early snapshot and Dow futures 0.34%; both have moved since.

What to watch today

The US bond market is closed for Columbus Day, as SIFMA advises; the NYSE and Nasdaq trade normal hours, 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET. The Toronto Stock Exchange is closed for Canadian Thanksgiving. The Federal Reserve’s daily statistical releases move to Tuesday.
No major US economic data is scheduled. Trading Economics lists remarks from Fed Governor Waller at 7:45 a.m. ET and Cleveland Fed President Hammack at 4:50 p.m. ET, which we could not confirm on the Fed’s own calendar.
The telecoms at the open, after Friday’s declines and flat after-hours quotes: T-Mobile at $148.76, AT&T at $22.24, Verizon at $41.81.
LVMH reports after the European close, the first large luxury read of the quarter.
Oil, with Brent at $103.91 and the ceasefire claim unconfirmed by either Kyiv or Moscow.
Tuesday: JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Citigroup report third-quarter results before the open.
Wednesday: September CPI at 8:30 a.m. ET. Consensus is 3.6% year on year for the headline against 3.4% in August, and 2.5% for core against 2.4%, per the previews we found; with the 10-year at 5.24%, this is the week’s biggest scheduled number. PPI and retail sales follow Thursday at 8:30 a.m. ET, and TSMC reports Thursday. The next FOMC meeting is October 27–28.

Not financial advice. iTrading Buddy summarizes publicly available market data and news; every figure above is sourced from the reporting available before the US open on the date shown. Verify anything you act on.