Market Midday: Stocks Higher, S&P 500 and Nasdaq at Records, Housing Woes • 10/6/26

0:00See NBC Business News Update. I'm Jessica Ettinger. A record-setting day on Wall Street with both the S &P 500 index and the NASDAQ hitting fresh record highs today. Treasury yields were pulling back the yield on the 10-year note after hitting 5.4 % yesterday, a 24-year high. It's back down to about 5.25 % this afternoon. That's helping stocks. The Dow up 342 points, more than a half percent. Cisco shares leading at higher. They're up two and a half percent. The S &P 500 index up 60 points. And the Nasdaq is up 189 points. That's more than a half percent. Companies whose shares have hit fresh all-time highs today include Thermo Fisher Scientific, Johnson Controls, CrowdStrike, F5 Networks, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, AMD, and NVIDIA.

0:53The Nasdaq 100 has been ripping the equal weighted S &P 500 underwater, and it's netted out to a S &P 500 that's protected you if you're an index investor as the rest of the market registered the higher yields and higher oil prices where it mattered. So I do think you have a market today where the leaders are leading and the laggards are bouncing. That's the ideal setup. That's CNBC's Mike Santoli. The U.S. economy is being called two prong at the moment. Some feel it's a little bit precarious being held up by both consumer spending, which always accounts for about two thirds of economic growth.

1:29It's mostly the wealthy doing most of that spending. And by AI spending, AI companies plowing money into capital expenditures. High end spending because people are spending their portfolios. We'll see how long that lasts. And then we have the AI CapEx. And that's the vitality in the economy right now. It's a two pronged economy. That's Rosenberg Research's David Rosenberg on CNBC. He's here with CNBC's Carl Quintanilla and with a little warning. If one of those prongs ends up falling by the wayside, you've got nothing left to pick up the support. You're right. We're being held up by two very powerful stilts, but stilts nonetheless.

2:06The midterm elections one month from today. Housing affordability is an election issue. It turns out many Americans are spending more than the recommended one-third of their take-home pay on rent or on the mortgage payment. With mortgage rates rising along with the cost of everything else, housing is the sore point for consumers. One in five Americans who rent or have a mortgage spend half or more of their pre-tax income on housing. Half spend between 25 and 49 percent. And that's according to CNBC and SurveyMonkey's quarterly money survey released in October. The standard guideline from banks and lenders is about 30 percent.

2:46That's CNBC's Diana Olick. U.S. crude oil pulled back to around$88 a barrel. It was still$68 a barrel the day before the U.S. sent missiles into Iran at the end of last February. President Trump signing an executive order allowing cheaper red-dyed diesel on highways to try to lower prices for truckers. Fuel for tractors and construction equipment is dyed red and often taxed at a lower rate in many states. Here's a take from Real Macros' Jeff Curry on CNBC. I mean, it definitely helps at the margin. You know, it's off-road diesel, you know, farm equipment, but other off-road vehicles that are not on the road.

3:26So it's a much, much smaller market. It's not going to have a profound impact on this. New data from Edmonds. In the third quarter, the average car payment hit a new record high at$787 a month. National Taco Tuesdays here. Deals and discounts today at many chains in the U.S. McDonald's started its Monopoly game up again today. Top prize, a million dollars cash. Jessica Edinger, CNBC. This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, provides an information-packed daily market preview on stock updates, U.S.

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