Technology shares slide into month end as bond yields fall

A bruising end to October for technology

American technology shares ended October under heavy selling. On Friday 30 October The Wall Street Journal reported that US stocks slid as quarterly results from Amazon and Intel set off another round of selling in companies tied to artificial intelligence. A few hours earlier the same paper said a deepening technology selloff was pushing the Nasdaq towards its worst month in more than a year. Its coverage of the session also recorded a jump in oil and a fall in cryptocurrencies.

This is Money, writing late that evening, reached for stronger language. Its headline spoke of Halloween 'carnage' on Wall Street, a day early, and said the slump in technology share prices had sparked fears of a stock market crash. The word carnage appeared in quotation marks, attributed rather than asserted.

The fears were reported. Nothing in the material measures them.

By the weekend the Journal's attention had moved from prices to protection and to funding. On Saturday it argued that Wall Street is starting to call the shots in America's AI build-out; the article's web address names the new bottleneck as a shortage of cheap money. On Sunday 1 November it reported that AI investors are racing to buy insurance on what it called the biggest market bet in history. The two pieces dealt with different ends of the same trade: those who finance it, and those who hold it. The second appeared two days after Friday's slide.

Bonds, a hedge fund and an exchange

Government bonds moved the other way. The Journal reported on Friday evening that global bond yields fell sharply in October amid a flight to safety. The address of that story refers to US Treasury yields falling to multi-week lows in Asian trading. Because bond prices rise as yields fall, the month that was hard on the Nasdaq was a kinder one for holders of government debt, at least in the terms the headline describes.

Elsewhere the strain showed in a single fund. The Journal reported that the hedge fund Arini is offloading $800 million in debt as its losses deepen. The headline gives the size of the sale and the direction of the losses; it does not, in the material available here, give the cause. The story was published on Friday night, within an hour of the paper's report on the Amazon and Intel selling.

Cryptocurrency had its own weekend story. Sky News reported on Saturday that Binance says the majority of the funds stolen in a cryptocurrency hack have been replenished. The claim is the exchange's own, and Sky's headline attributes it accordingly. The headline does not give the size of the theft. It followed a Friday session in which the Journal had recorded crypto falling alongside the selloff in technology shares.

Oil profits, charity shops and household bills

In London the week's most cheerful headline belonged to BP. This is Money reported on Friday evening that the company's profits had quadrupled in a year and that its shares had risen 39%, a boost to what the paper called BP's army of small investors. The article's web address ties the record windfall to high energy prices. On the same day the Journal recorded oil jumping during the American session.

Not every British business was counting gains. The Guardian reported on Saturday that profits at UK charity shops have plummeted amid a shift in the secondhand clothes market. Oxfam is named in the article's address. The story sits in the paper's society pages rather than its business coverage, though the shift it describes is a commercial one.

The Guardian also ran a piece on the new savings tax rates set in Budget 2026, published early on Saturday morning. Its headline frames it as a guide to beating those rates; this journal records only that the new rates exist and that savers were being written to about them.

Across the Atlantic, the Journal reported that Affordable Care Act rates are set to rise steeply. Its headline ends with the word 'again'. That report was published on Friday afternoon, twenty minutes after the paper's story on the Nasdaq.

Household bills, in Britain and America alike, shared the weekend's pages with the markets.