Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq drop after sharp tech sell-off, oil prices rise

Oil prices climbed to a 6-month high on Friday as traders priced the odds of escalating fighting in the Middle East. Attacks near the Red Sea also stoked worries of further constraints on oil supplies from the region.

Brent crude (BZ=F) futures for December delivery settled at $116.72 per barrel. The international benchmark posted its third consecutive week of gains. Meanwhile, West Texas Intermediate crude (CL=F) closed just above $103 a barrel.

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Cybersecurity stocks jumped on Friday, with SailPoint (SAIL), Cloudflare (NET), and Palo Alto Networks (PANW) each rising more than 7%.

The move came alongside an Evercore ISI survey that found a strengthening budget outlook for security. According to the survey, spending is aimed at securing data, AI, identities, and cloud.

Okta (OKTA) and Fortinet (FTNT) were two of the channel partners with strong pipelines.

Cybersecurity stocks have been on fire this year, fueled by AI-driven spending and growing warnings from tech giants about the risks of increasingly powerful agents.

The First Trust Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR) reached an all-time high earlier this month. Over the past 5 days, the CIBR is up roughly 7%.

Yahoo Finance’s Ben Werschkul reports:

President Trump, for the second day in a row, telegraphed an escalation in Iran after the midterm elections and an extended standoff, with the Strait of Hormuz still at the center of the conflict.

“The question is: Do we want to finish it off or do we just want to let it wither because we’re getting everything we wanted,” the president told reporters on Friday morning as he touted evidence of Middle East oil exports surpassing prewar levels.

The comments also came after Trump’s ambassador to the UN told the Financial Times that the war could last another year and that the US is prepared for a long-term standoff, but that he hoped negotiations would end the conflict sooner.

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Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian reports:

SpaceX (SPCX) investors have had a rocky week. A third-quarter report that beat estimates and Elon Musk’s open backing of a merger with Tesla (TSLA) sent shares surging Wednesday, but a Thursday sell-off erased the gain.

Shares climbed slightly on Friday amid news that the company’s mobile aspirations are picking up. Bloomberg reports the company is looking to lease space on 80,000 cell sites across the US to build out a terrestrial network. SpaceX is reportedly in talks with two of the largest owners of cellular towers, Crown Castle and American Tower.

In its Q3 report, SpaceX reported that Connectivity revenue, mostly from Starlink, rose 69% to $5.2 billion. President Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink added 1.6 million subscribers in the quarter, bringing the total to just under 14 million broadband consumer subscribers.

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Moderna (MRNA) trimmed losses Friday, rebounding from a sharp sell-off in the previous session, as investors digested data from a late-stage trial of its personalized melanoma vaccine.

The stock opened lower but climbed into positive territory during the session, a day after plunging more than 17% on Thursday in its worst single-day performance since Aug. 20.

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Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports:

In July, SK Hynix (SKHY) raised $26.5 billion in the biggest US listing ever by a foreign company. Now the company is walking away from one of the biggest tech IPOs ever.

The South Korean memory giant said Friday it has shelved plans to list Solidigm, its flash memory unit, in the US, citing market conditions and share price trends. Solidigm had aimed to raise $10 billion to $15 billion at a valuation of up to $150 billion, according to industry estimates cited by the Wall Street Journal.

For a clue to why, look at the company’s own stock.

SK Hynix priced its US shares at $149 in July. SK Hynix stock is rising on Friday but still trades below that price, about a third below the stock’s September record.

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Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports:

Apple (AAPL) is taking Wall Street’s crown back from Nvidia — for the fifth time.

Apple briefly topped Nvidia in market value on Friday. It’s a move Apple has made before, and it has rarely stuck.

Apple and Nvidia (NVDA) are each worth about $5.1 trillion, and the gap between them was less than 1% at Thursday’s close. The flip came alongside a record run for Apple’s stock and the day the tech giant’s $1,999 iPhone Duo hit stores, capping a battle investors had been watching all morning. Nvidia has since moved back into the lead.

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Shares of American Express (AXP) fell 3% Friday after the credit card giant delivered third quarter results and said it plans to eliminate roughly 5% of its workforce globally as part of a restructuring effort.

American Express CEO Stephen Squeri told analysts the cuts are part of a restructuring effort to make the company a “more agile and efficient organization.” As part of the effort, the firm recognized a $336 million restructuring charge in the third quarter.

A company spokesperson told Yahoo Finance the reduction will eliminate 3,500 roles globally.

Squeri added that earlier this year he asked senior executives to find ways to cut corporate bloat across the company in order to refocus on American Express’ biggest priorities. 

Earlier this month, federal bank regulators fined the credit card giant $350 million over widespread failures in its anti-money laundering controls.

In the third quarter, American Express reported revenue climbed 9% to $14.5 billion from a year ago while adjusted earnings per share rose 13% to $4.68. Analysts were expecting $14.8 billion in revenue.

Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:

Don’t expect SpaceX (SPCX) to surprise investors like Meta (META) did this week by announcing it would issue a new class of nonvoting stock to help fund its AI build-out.

“Importantly, in our discussion w/management, SPCX also said that it is not considering raising equity,” JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth wrote in a new post-earnings note on Friday. “Capital requirements are front and center across the market, and SPCX indicated it has a number of available pools of capital on the debt side.”

SpaceX gave investors a taste of what could be to come on the debt funding front in its earnings report this week.

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Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX) may be close to sending another message to the telecom giants: we are seriously coming for you.

The company is eyeing the purchase of 80,000 cell sites across the US, Bloomberg reported on Friday. SpaceX is reportedly in talks with two of the companies, Crown Castle and American Tower, among the largest owners of cellular towers.

“Committing ~$30 billion into spectrum is serious enough. Committing to 80K macro sites could be a point of no return,” Bernstein analyst Laurent Yoon said. “That is a meaningful number, broadly consistent with the scale required for a nationwide terrestrial wireless network. Whether SpaceX ultimately leases anything close to that figure remains uncertain, but the reported scope suggests a far greater level of commitment than spectrum accumulation alone.”

Shares of AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), and T-Mobile (TMUS) traded sharply lower in pre-market trading.

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The tech sell-off on Thursday sent investors rushing into bonds, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield (^TNX) to its biggest one-day drop in more than two years and back below 5%.

Behind the move was a shift in rate expectations as longer-term yields fell. With the Federal Reserve set to meet next week, on Oct. 28, investors had been bracing for a rate hike to combat fears of oil-driven inflation.

But those bets faded quickly with the Fed funds futures market putting the odds of an October hike at about 5%, according to Bloomberg data, down from 15% earlier this week, and 37% at the end of September.

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Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:

Tesla’s (TSLA) surprise $5 billion haircut to its capital expenditure plans in its latest earnings call hasn’t shaken investor confidence in the long-term potential of a large Cybercab network.

Maybe some near-term confidence was lost in the Optimus humanoid as Tesla deals with design challenges, but not in Cybercabs.

Case in point: Even the reasonable modeling assumptions on the Cybercab from Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco, who has an Equal Weight rating on the stock, still have the fleet size hitting 5 million by the end of 2040. That will be fueled by sharp growth over the next three years, as the chart below indicates.

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