stock market candlestick chart on dark screen by Maxim Hopman courtesy of Unsplash.

Market Update for November 9, 2026

Jeffrey B. Snyder, CFP® |
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Market Update

I think after the midterms I owe my clients a touchpoint.  Here are some of my current thoughts on the markets:

  • I wrote several times I expected markets this year to be muted, and that "call" has been mixed.  The first quarter ended terribly, and the S&P 500 was down on the year to date heading into April.  The second quarter was exceptional, as incredibly impressive earnings drove us beyond the scary Iran war headlines.  Quarter three was just slightly positive, and so far in Q4 the market is down 3.5% after last week's washout.  The 6-month return on the S&P 500 is almost exactly flat, and its year-to-date gains are now 7.76% as I write this on Saturday November 7th.  Single digit gains also exist for the DJIA, NASDAQ, MSCI-EFA, and EEM.  The small-cap-centric Russell 2000 is slightly outperforming at 10.14% year-to-date.
    • All of these returns are hanging in the balance in terms of "will 2026 end up being muted or decent," as of course anything below these numbers one might call "muted" and if there is a rebound into the 10%+ range for most indices I would mark that as "decent."
    • This week had a ton of volatility, which can be expected just after the election, but Thursday was an anomaly in how violent the downtick was.
  • ^VIX is a measure of the CBOE Volatility Index, essentially explaining how volatile the stock market is as a whole.  Thursday we hit a level not seen since late March 2026.  All-time highs around the peak of the 2008 financial crisis and in the early days of COVID were over twice the levels reached Thursday, however.  Essentially, we've "seen this before," but it has been a while, and it's rare.
  • The main concern in the markets this week, and over the past several quarters, is the tenuous situation surrounding data centers and the AI buildout.  On one day, tech stocks rally because either there is a new announcement about data center spend, OR in some cases there is a reduced commitment to that spend- I recall specifically Microsoft stock rising incredibly on July 30th, one day after their earnings on July 29, where they surprised the markets by announcing they were NOT increasing their AI-spend/buildout.  The stock was at one point up 17% on July 30th, largely attributed to that announcement.  Other times the market yearns for updates where companies are putting their profits to work for future additional profits in emerging business segments, in the opposite fashion from the Microsoft summer earnings' story.  Confusing times indeed.
  • I have often mentioned in previous blogs that getting the "growth vs. value" bet correct is incredibly important in terms of asset allocation, and although slightly oversimplifying things, one could reword this bet as "tech vs. non-tech."  There is currently a 28% delta between the two, as measured by the ETF's IWD (Large cap domestic value) and IWF (Large cap domestic growth).  IWD is +22.40% and IWF is -5.6%.  This shows some of the troubles of the AI/tech trade, as they are much heavier weighted within IWF than IWD.  
  • Individual stocks really matter though, when it comes to performance of any ETF or mutual fund/variable subaccount.  This has been a year where there is quite a lot of divergence between famous names, both in and outside of tech.  Here is a smattering of individual names year-to-date:
    • NVDA: FLAT
    • AAPL: +26%
    • MSFT: +10%
    • ORCL: -40%
    • META: -7%
    • GOOG: -9%
    • AMZN: +12%
    • WMT: +13%
    • JPM: +6%
    • XOM: +41%
    • CVX: +43%
    • BOE: -20%
    • MCD: -10%
    • PFE: +18%
    • Look at that list of names.  I don't know about you, but I cannot make a coherent trend out of that data, and those are MAJOR stocks in this country (7 tech and 7 non-tech).

Going forward:  November and December in aggregate in the mid-term election year have had a 68.4% (13 out of 19) chance of increase, historically, from 1950-2022, but the worst performance for that short period was just experienced in 2018 (-7.6%).  From the close of business Halloween of the mid-term year to Halloween of the third year of the Presidential cycle- i.e. last week to 51 weeks from now, essentially- zero of those periods have been negative since 1950, and the average performance for the S&P 500 is +16.6%.  Finally, and in the same vein, the last third-year of the cycle that was negative was 1939, and the total return was down less than 1%.  As you would know from your history books, FDR was President and we entered WWII that very year.