Four percent off the index, and a jobs print at half past two

On Thursday Wall Street had its worst session since April 2025¹. The Nasdaq Composite fell about 5.5% and closed more than 10% below its recent high, which is the textbook definition of a correction¹. The S&P 500 lost about 4.4%; the Dow fell more than 1,800 points, or about 3.4%¹. All eleven sectors of the S&P finished lower¹. Futures after the close pointed a little lower still¹.

What the market was pricing. The trigger was not a surprise from a company. It was a reading of Tuesday’s midterms. Democrats’ gains in the House and Senate, and in statehouses such as Texas, revived traders’ fears that data-centre construction and the AI build-out could slow under tighter rules^1,3. Shares tied to that build-out led the fall: Micron and Advanced Micro Devices each dropped about 17%, Nvidia about 9%, and the so-called Magnificent Seven lost more than $1 trillion of market value between them¹. Nvidia turned negative for the year¹. President Trump blamed the Democrats for “one of the Worst Days in History”; FactSet’s quieter label was simply the worst session since April 2025¹.

What travels overnight. By Friday morning in Asia the same story had a second chapter. South Korea’s Kospi plunged more than 6% at one point and later more than 8%, enough to trip circuit breakers; Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell into a bear market, more than 20% below its June peak¹. Chip names from SK Hynix to TSMC and SoftBank were cut hard¹. That is how a New York afternoon becomes a Tokyo morning: the same argument, a different opening bell. Europe closed mixed on Thursday — Spain up, Germany and Britain slightly down — before the full force of the Nasdaq session was in¹.

What arrives at 14:30. The October US jobs report is due at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, 14:30 in Berlin². Economists polled for the Dow Jones consensus expect about 59,000 nonfarm jobs and an unemployment rate still at 4.2%^1,2. That would be sparse by the standards of a decade ago, and roughly in line with a labour market that has been adding only about 35,000 jobs a month on average since early 2025². Layoffs remain low — initial claims fell to 189,000 last week — while long-term unemployment has been rising². Markets were pricing roughly a 70% chance of a quarter-point Federal Reserve rise on 9 December before the print¹. The Bank of England, for its part, has already moved: Bank Rate is 4% as of Thursday [see Money].

The constructive reading. A one-day liquidation is loud; it is not yet a verdict on the machinery underneath. Payrolls, claims, openings and wages are duller, and they are what the Fed actually debates. Data-centre politics is real — voters rejected or restricted projects in 40 of 41 local ballot measures counted by Ballotpedia and CNBC³ — but a ballot measure is not a national ban, and a sell-off is not a statute. For you, the useful habit on a morning like this is narrow: wait for the jobs table before you rewrite the story of the week. The index tells you how scared people were at 22:00 Berlin time. The payrolls table tells you whether the labour market still looks like the one the committees have been describing. Nothing here is investment advice.