Published Oct 2, 2026, 4:31 PM ET
What was underneath the day's equity move: participation, movers, catalysts and open questions.
The desk that writes this up in words is the Equities desk. Its latest edition is written from a live reading at its slot; every figure on this page is a stored close.
Today's move, what drove it, and what the available information cannot explain.
Capitalisation weighted, so a move in the largest companies moves it more than a move in the smallest.
Every Nasdaq listing, weighted by capitalisation and heavy in technology.
Thirty names weighted by price rather than by capitalisation, so it can disagree with the S&P for arithmetic reasons alone.
Small capitalisation names. Read against the S&P, it is the size half of how broad a day was.
The same five hundred companies weighted equally, so the largest names count no more than the smallest. Read against the cap-weighted index, the gap is how much of the day belonged to the biggest companies.
The cap-weighted index outran the equal-weighted one, so the largest companies carried more of the session than their number.
38%
3 of 8 tracked indices above their 50-day average
Counted over ^GSPC, ^IXIC, ^DJI, ^RUT, ^FTSE, ^N225, ^GDAXI, 000001.SS. This is a reading across whole market indices, not a count of the companies inside any one of them.
CNN's own index, stored at the close. Context for whether sentiment confirms the tape or contradicts it.
Expected thirty day volatility from S&P 500 options. Rising with the index is the contradiction worth seeing.
Reported cloud and AI driven earnings two sessions earlier, a plausible delayed catalyst for the sharp decline.
News event dated 2026-09-30, CNBC Top News: Accenture earnings surge on cloud, AI demand
Moved 6.3%, at or above the 3% floor for this strip
Same day headline attributes the opening gain directly to the move being described.
Headline dated 2026-10-02: Tesla Inc Stock (TSLA) Opened Up by 4.34% on Oct 2: Facts Behind the Movement - TradingKey
Moved 4.7%, at or above the 3% floor for this strip
Same day headline asking what is driving the stock, consistent with the reported gain.
Headline dated 2026-10-02: What's Going On With Super Micro Computer Stock Friday? - Benzinga
Moved 4.2%, at or above the 3% floor for this strip
Same day report of disappointing sales and new layoffs matches the size and direction of the decline.
News event dated 2026-10-02, MarketWatch Top Stories: Nike shares slide on disappointing sales and new layoffs amid turnaround struggles
Moved 3.6%, at or above the 3% floor for this strip
Same day headline questioning the stock drop aligns with the reported decline.
Headline dated 2026-10-02: Coinbase Stock Drops: What's Going On? - Benzinga
Moved 3.3%, at or above the 3% floor for this strip
The evidence read for this company over the 7 days before the session was its own SEC filings, its stored corporate actions, the headline feed collected for its ticker and the clustered news events this system collects every two hours across every category. Rows naming this company were read inside that window and none of them was resolved to this session's move.
Moved 3.1%, at or above the 3% floor for this strip
Reported a large AI chip supply deal with Tencent the prior day, a plausible driver of the gain.
News event dated 2026-10-01, MarketWatch Top Stories: Oracle reportedly signs $7 billion deal with Tencent for AI chip access in China
Moved 3.1%, at or above the 3% floor for this strip
Built in code from the movers whose evidence did not resolve, so no written summary can shorten this list.
Participation held at 3 of 8 tracked indices above their 50-day average, unchanged from last session, even though the S&P 500 gain of 0.73% was larger than the prior session's 0.19% move.
Fear and Greed rose 10.71% to 31 and the VIX fell 6.59%, showing sentiment and volatility readings moving together this session, unlike the prior session's divergence.
The Nasdaq Composite rose 1.19% against the Dow's 0.49%, a wider 0.70 point spread across indices than the prior session's 0.31 point divergence.
Sector performance ranged from Consumer Discretionary up 1.13% to Health Care down 0.01%, a narrower spread than the prior session's Energy to Health Care range of 3.27 points.
One session, from the stored closes of the eleven sector ETFs. Each bar is scaled against the widest move of the day, so the shape is the spread and not an absolute size.