The worst week since June, from a record nine trading days old

The S&P 500 fell 1.95% on the week to 7,659.44, its largest weekly percentage fall since the week ending 26 June, according to Dow Jones Market Data¹. Friday alone took 1.09%. The index is now 2.04% below the record close of 7,818.93 set on Tuesday, 6 October, and has fallen on six of the last eight trading days¹.

Keep the scale in view. The same data show the index still up 11.89% this year and 11.35% since the war began on 28 February¹. A record nine trading days old is not a crash; it is a high-water mark the market has stepped back from.

The composition is the story. The Nasdaq Composite lost 4.5% on the week, while the Dow industrials still rose². The Wall Street Journal put CoreWeave at the centre of the week’s tech rout, with investors worried about what higher borrowing costs do to the most leveraged players in the data-centre build-out². Friday’s damage was broad but not total: slightly more than half of S&P 500 stocks fell³.

So money did not leave the market. It moved from the companies that need financing towards the ones that send invoices and collect them. That is the dull machinery working: a rising cost of money sorting balance sheets, one bond yield at a time.