Wednesday belonged to the buyers. The S&P 500 gained 1.58%, its equal-weight version 1.87%, the Dow 3.03%, the Nasdaq Composite 1.44% and the Russell 2000 1.58%. Treasuries rallied with yields lower across the curve, helped by a slump in Brent of about 8% to around $95, and the dollar index eased 0.35%. Gold jumped 3.25% and silver 4.75%. The midterm elections were the trigger. The Democratic sweep of both chambers removed a source of uncertainty, and the size of the result fed a view that the White House will be less inclined to escalate against Iran, which is what sent oil lower. The weak spot was the data-center supply chain, where chips and power names sold off on worries about permitting after the Texas governor’s race, while the hyperscalers and Apple absorbed the rotation.
Thursday’s session, still open as this article goes out, has turned that around for the US indices. As of this writing the S&P 500 trades 3.4% lower near 7,428, its lowest level since late July, and the Nasdaq 100 5.3% lower near 26,946, its lowest since April. The semiconductor index trades 10% lower and Nvidia 7.6% lower. Gold, the gold miners and the long-bond ETF trade higher, and the Hang Seng closed its Thursday session 3.7% higher. The calendar ahead holds the October jobs report on Friday, the October CPI next Tuesday and Nvidia’s results on November 17. Against this tape our cycle model puts twenty markets on its floor side, the most since this series began in April, four of them at its strongest floor reading.
This week’s floor calls are being answered in the order they were made. Gold and Hong Kong, which the model flagged first in mid-October, are back at its strongest floor reading of +100 and their prices have turned up. The US indices, flagged last on Saturday, keep their floor readings, while Thursday’s selling pushes their prices back through the levels of the call. In plain terms, the model sees the same kind of floor in all of them, the metal and Hong Kong have started to deliver on it, and Wall Street is still being tested. The ceiling flagged in the energy sector on Saturday has already paid 9.3% in three sessions.
The record behind that split is dated. The Hang Seng ceiling flagged on September 3 paid 9% to its October 22 low, and the floor flagged on October 10 closed Thursday 2.4% above its call level, with the same 110-day cycle that carried the ceiling now sitting at its trough, 63 days later, half its length. The DAX floor flagged on October 21 closed Wednesday at its highest since August 28, 6.6% above its October 8 low. The gold-miner observation we placed below the alarm zone on Saturday became the model’s strongest floor reading on Wednesday, with the ETF up 9.7% from Friday’s close. The uranium floor from October 28 has no price answer yet, with the price 5.7% lower on Thursday at its lowest since May 2025. That is no guarantee either way, but it is the sequence the model exists to show, floors called early and answered one at a time.
Our daily scan runs about 45 global markets through the cycle engine and condenses each into a Consensus Score, the model’s measure of how far 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 enter the critical zone, a critical reading at which the cycle model raises the alarm for a possible turn. Let’s take a closer look.
