Market Close: Stocks Higher, Anthropic IPO Buzz, Candy Sales Lag • 10/26/26

0:01See NBC Business News Update. I'm Jessica Ettinger. Wall Street opens Tuesday morning after a winning Monday. Some excitement that Anthropic will issue shares to the public for the first time, possibly before Thanksgiving, helped to lift stocks. The Dow is up 146 points. Cisco shares led it higher. They were up 3.5%. The S &P 500 index added 53 points. The Nasdaq up 214 points. That was eight-tenths of a percent. A lot of bubble talk on Wall Street, especially surrounding artificial intelligence, but some investors are not worried. I think air is coming out of the bubble without the bubble bursting, which is the best solution to all these concerns.

0:43I think the fact that the bond market's going to regulate the availability of capital to the AI trade, I think we're in good shape. Yardani Research's Ed Yardani on CNBC. Anthropics initial public offering documents revealed. Monday, the ticker symbol will be ANT, A-N-T. It will likely issue shares before Thanksgiving. Axios business editor Dan Primack notes, the documents list pages and pages of risks with AI. This isn't just outside critics or former employees. This is coming often from inside the house when they talk about the existential threat to humanity, which, by the way, is my favorite part of this entire S1.

1:21But then it's followed by which could impact our financial performance. It goes from this crazy thing, the very boilerplate financial, like it's a plumbing supplies company all of a sudden. Full coverage of the Anthropic IPO on CNBC TV, CNBC.com and the CNBC app on your phone. Another pre-Christmas streamlining move at a major U.S. employer. Microsoft offering buyouts to 60 ,000 employees. By some counts, it could be a quarter of its workforce. They're calling this a voluntary exit offer. They say in this blog post, workers will receive benefits that are similar to a standard severance package.

1:58It does follow the buyout offer to retirement age employees that we saw back in July from Microsoft. At the time, more than 30 percent of those employees that were eligible did accept. That's CNBC's Kate Rooney. Companies whose shares hit fresh all-time highs Monday include Chevron and Exxon. Oil prices above$100 a barrel for U.S. crude at$102. Brent crude, the world's benchmark, at$116 a barrel. Here's TP Moab's John Wagner on CNBC. It is about as wild as it can possibly get. People have actually said, I can't play this market and I'm out. We are basically throwing darts. We don't know what Trump's going to do.

2:36We don't know what the Houthis are going to do. We don't know what Israel's going to do. People are deathly afraid of, you know, a tweet from Trump sending oil down$15. And they just said, look, I can't, you know, I can't be involved in something where I'm just going to lose everything so quickly. JetBlue shares tanked 13 percent Monday on reports the airline's working to restructure its debt as high jet fuel prices squeeze margins. Halloween candy sales off to a slow start this year. Consumers pulling back. Research firm Nielsen IQ reports that sales, this is concerning, fell 6.7 percent in the month ending October 17th.

3:13Compared to the same period last year, Nielsen also notes an 11.7 % decline in candy sales in mid-September, erasing the preseason gains that Halloween candy enjoyed the previous two years. Why? Higher chocolate prices and affordability concerns. That's CNBC's Joe Kernan. A busy Tuesday ahead. Earnings are coming from Boeing, Coca-Cola, UPS, Hilton, JetBlue, Visa, Robinhood, to name a few. The Fed begins a two-day meeting on interest rates. We get the latest on durable goods orders, a look at home prices, and we get the new consumer confidence data. Jessica Edinger, CNBC. Hey, Fidelity. Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app?

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