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This Week on Wall Street |
| Week of September 28, 2026 |
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| Energy sets the tone as the week opens. Iran carried a conditional offer to the United Nations meetings in New York: reopen the Strait of Hormuz within a week, in exchange for lifting the naval blockade, easing oil sanctions and releasing frozen assets. Washington turned it down over the weekend, and Tehran says it is still waiting on a formal answer through mediators. Brent traded above $107 a barrel early Monday. Roughly a fifth of global oil supply crossed the strait before it closed in late February, and transit counts remain well below the pre-war norm, so every turn in these talks reaches the whole energy complex. The seven OPEC+ members that set monthly output meet Sunday, though the group's decisions have carried less weight while the waterway stays constrained. Wednesday closes the third quarter, which tends to bring rebalancing flows of its own on top of the headlines. |
| This is one of the denser data weeks of the year, and it runs on two tracks. The labor side reports almost daily: job openings Tuesday, private payrolls Wednesday, weekly claims Thursday, and the September employment report Friday. Consensus looks for roughly 90,000 jobs added, with the unemployment rate holding at its recent low. That would keep the three-month average of monthly gains close to where it sat in the spring, after a summer of uneven prints. The inflation side arrives Wednesday with the August reading on the Fed's preferred price gauge, where consensus looks for core prices to rise 0.3% on the month against a yearly rate that has stayed above target all year. The two readings land within forty-eight hours of each other, and they are the pair the Fed weighs against one another. Softer hiring and firm prices argue for different things, so an ordinary week of releases carries more than it usually would. Wednesday also brings the final estimate of second quarter growth, which closes the book on the first half. |
| Index concentration is worth a look as the quarter turns. The ten largest names in the S&P 500 now carry close to 38% of the index, near double the share they held a decade ago. That is a mechanical outcome rather than a judgment. Cap weighting hands the largest share to whichever companies have already appreciated most, and the more they lead, the larger that share grows. The practical effect is that the headline index and the average stock inside it can tell different stories for years at a time, which is what separates equal-weighted and cap-weighted versions of the same 500 companies. It cuts both ways. A concentrated benchmark can be carried by a handful of results when the rest of the market is flat, and pulled down by the same handful when they stumble. For a diversified portfolio, the useful question is less which names lead than how much of the total sits with them. |
Lifetime Returns Across U.S. Stocks |
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| Sorting nearly a century of U.S. stocks by their lifetime cumulative return shows how uneven the distribution is. The single largest group is the one that lost money, covering about half of the more than 29,000 companies in the sample. At the other end, roughly one in ten cleared a tenfold gain, and that tail is where essentially all of the net wealth the market created above the return on cash came from. |
| Source: Hendrik Bessembinder, “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?,” 2024, using CRSP data from December 1925 to December 2023 |
Economic Releases This Week |
| Monday | None | | Tuesday | Consumer Confidence, JOLTS,
Case-Shiller Home Price Index | | Wednesday | ADP Employment, PCE Price Index,
Consumer Spending, GDP (Q2 Third Estimate) | | Thursday | Initial Jobless Claims, ISM Manufacturing | | Friday | Jobs Report |
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Stories to Start the Week |
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What is Newton? |
| Our Newton model determines the highest probability of future price direction using advanced algorithmic and high-order mathematical techniques on the current market environment. It scores securities over multiple time periods on a 0–20 scale (0 worst, 20 best). Trend and level both matter. A name moving from 18 to 16 still signals a strong level, with slight exhaustion in the trend. ▼ 0–8 declining ▬ 9–13 neutral ▲ 14–20 strong |
| Equities | Trend | This Wk | Last Wk | | Emerging Markets | ▲ | 16 | 12 | | Large Cap | ▲ | 14 | 14 | | Mid Cap | ▼ | 8 | 10 | | Small Cap | ▼ | 8 | 8 | | Foreign Developed | ▼ | 6 | 7 |
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| Fixed Income | Trend | This Wk | Last Wk | | Floating Rate Bond | ▬ | 11 | 12 | | Long-Term Bond | ▼ | 7 | 9 | | High Yield Bond | ▼ | 5 | 8 | | Short Term Bond | ▼ | 5 | 7 | | Corporate Bond | ▼ | 3 | 7 | | Intermediate Term Bond | ▼ | 3 | 7 |
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| Sectors | Trend | This Wk | Last Wk | | Technology | ▲ | 17 | 12 | | Communications | ▲ | 14 | 14 | | Materials | ▬ | 11 | 11 | | Consumer Cyclical | ▬ | 10 | 9 | | Health Care | ▬ | 9 | 13 | | Consumer Defensive | ▼ | 8 | 8 | | Industrials | ▼ | 7 | 5 | | Financials | ▼ | 5 | 7 | | Energy | ▼ | 4 | 4 | | Real Estate | ▼ | 2 | 7 | | Utilities | ▼ | 0 | 0 |
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| Market Segments | Trend | This Wk | Last Wk | | Large Growth | ▲ | 16 | 14 | | Small Growth | ▬ | 10 | 8 | | Mid-Cap Growth | ▬ | 10 | 7 | | Large Value | ▼ | 7 | 9 | | Small Value | ▼ | 5 | 6 | | Mid-Cap Value | ▼ | 5 | 6 |
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Notable Newton Moves This Week: Technology jumped 12 to 17 and took the top sector spot, with Communications holding at 14 as the only other read in the strong band. Growth firmed across the style box, Large Growth moving 14 to 16 while Small Growth and Mid-Cap Growth both rose into neutral, and every value segment slipped. Fixed income weakened almost uniformly, with Corporate Bond and Intermediate Term Bond each falling 7 to 3 and High Yield Bond 8 to 5. Real Estate posted the sharpest single drop at 7 to 2, and Health Care gave back 13 to 9. |
Technical trading models are mathematically driven based upon historical data and trends of domestic and foreign market trading activity, including various industry and sector trading statistics within such markets. Technical trading models, through mathematical algorithms, attempt to identify when markets are likely to increase or decrease and identify appropriate entry and exit points. The primary risk of technical trading models is that historical trends and past performance cannot predict future trends and there is no assurance that the mathematical algorithms employed are designed properly, updated with new data, and can accurately predict future market, industry and sector performance.
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