Friday brought a hesitant rebound after a heavy Thursday. The S&P 500 rose 0.31%, the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.09% and the Russell 2000 0.89%, while the equal-weight S&P 500 slipped 0.36% and the Dow lost 0.46%. The chip and data-center names that had taken the worst of the selling led the bounce, which rested more on oversold positioning than on fresh conviction. A strong October jobs report lifted the two-year yield by about 5 basis points and the dollar index by 0.74%, and markets still price a Fed hike on December 9. Oil was little changed on the day after a week in which it lost more than a tenth of its value.
Thursday did the damage. The S&P 500 fell 4.36% to 7,354, its lowest close since July 29, the Nasdaq 100 dropped 6.36% to its lowest since April 21 and the semiconductor index lost 12.25% to its lowest since April 10, after weak quarterly reports and a cut to IREN’s spending plans that the company tied to the pressure in the capital markets. Reports that Anthropic may have to accept a lower valuation for its listing, and talk of new AI legislation from the incoming Democratic majority, kept the sector on the defensive into Friday. Against that tape our cycle model closed the week with a clear split between the metals and Wall Street.
The model had flagged possible floors in the gold and silver miners since mid-October, and this week the price agreed. The Gold Mining ETF gained 13.6%, the junior gold miners 13.5% and the silver miners 11.4%, and all three now carry the model’s strongest floor reading of +100 together with a momentum signal that says the selling has given way. The model had also put the energy sector on its ceiling list at a multi-year high on October 31, and the sector has fallen 11.9% since. In plain terms, the metals and energy have followed the model’s readings, and Wall Street has not yet. The floor the model flagged under the S&P 500 on October 31 did not hold, and the chip index lost 12% on the week while its floor reading stayed open.
On October 31 the Gold Mining ETF stood just below the alarm zone at +58, with the composite of its cycles at its trough, and it has gained 13.6% since that close, back above the level of the October 21 floor call. The energy floor flagged on July 11 paid 28% to the October 30 high before the ceiling call took over. The Hang Seng ceiling flagged on September 3 paid 9% to its October 22 low, and the floor flagged on October 10 closed Thursday and Friday above its call level. Gold closed Thursday at 4,113.50, just above the close of the October 14 call, before easing 0.9% on Friday. Not every call has paid, because the floor flagged under the S&P 500 on October 31 gave way on Thursday, when a 4.4% drop took the index to its lowest close since July 29, 3% below the level of the call, and the uranium floor from October 28 fell to its lowest close since May 2025 the same day. Nothing here is inevitable, yet a week like this shows what the readings are for, an early alert that the price either confirms or refuses.
Our daily scan runs some 45 global markets through the cycle engine and condenses each into a Consensus Score, the model’s measure of how strongly the dominant cycles agree on a possible turn, from minus 100 for a possible top to plus 100 for a possible floor. Readings beyond plus or minus 60 form the critical zone, where the model raises the alarm for a possible turn. Let’s take a closer look.
