US stocks had their worst day since July on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 down 1.1% and the Nasdaq down 1.9%, after a hotter-than-expected inflation report raised expectations of another interest rate rise.
US stocks fell on Wednesday, 14 October 2026, in their worst day since July, according to Yahoo Finance, after a September inflation report that was hotter than expected raised expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates again. The S&P 500 fell 86.51 points, or 1.1%, to 7,718.94 and the Nasdaq Composite fell 511.51 points, or 1.9%, to 26,692.87. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell only 48.62 points, or 0.1%, to 51,621.48, and the Russell 2000 of small companies fell 53.84 points, or 1.9%, to 2,729.53.
The report says that artificial intelligence stocks were the heaviest weights on the market. They were also under pressure a week earlier, when a report that OpenAI’s revenue run rate was nearer $50 billion than $68 billion hit shares of Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave, as Delima News reported. The two shocks have fallen on the same group of stocks that have driven the market’s gains.
The weekly performance shows the damage. For the week the S&P 500 is down 92.60 points, or 1.2%, the Dow is down 33.47 points, or 0.1%, the Nasdaq is down 673.30 points, or 2.5%, and the Russell 2000 is down 77.45 points, or 2.8%, according to the report. The Dow’s small fall compared with the Nasdaq reflects the difference between the index of 30 large industrial and financial companies and the technology-heavy index.
Despite the fall, the indexes remain higher this year. The S&P 500 is up 873.44 points, or 12.8%, for 2026, the Dow is up 3,558.19 points, or 7.4%, the Nasdaq is up 3,450.88 points, or 14.8%, and the Russell 2000 is up 247.62 points, or 10%. That means that the Nasdaq has given back a small part of its gain in the past week, but it has a larger gain for the year than the other indexes.
The report also says that Bank of America fell after reporting weaker-than-expected earnings, which Delima News covers in a separate article on the banks. In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note was 5.19%, down 0.03 percentage points, according to the same report, and the figure shows how high borrowing costs for the government have gone.
Commodity prices were mixed in the sources. Yahoo’s table shows gold up 1.67% and the November oil contract down 0.30%, while a separate report says that West Texas Intermediate futures settled up 1.01% at $95.09 a barrel as fighting escalated between Saudi Arabia and Iran-backed Houthi militants. These two oil figures are for different contracts and measures, and a Trading Economics page gives a different move for gold, so Delima News does not give a single figure for either.
The trigger was the consumer price index, which rose 0.6% in September and 3.7% over the past year, a rise that Delima News analyses in a separate report. Higher inflation makes it more likely that the Fed will raise rates at its meeting on 27 and 28 October, a move that would raise the cost of borrowing for companies and households.
The market now has a series of events to watch: the Fed decision at the end of October, more bank and technology earnings and the midterm elections on 3 November. The fall on Wednesday shows how sensitive share prices are to the inflation data at a time when valuations of AI companies are high.
Image: The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street (file photo, 2017). Photo: Arild Vågen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
