Stock Market Today

Housing starts fell 5.2% in September to 1.221 million, the lowest since May (which was the lowest since May 2020), below all estimates in a Bloomberg survey (1.305 million median). August’s decline was also revised deeper, to 5.9% from 2.6%.

Single-family starts fell 4.6% to 859,000, the largest drop since April, to the lowest since September 2025. Multifamily fell 7.2% to 349,000.

Building permits though slipped just 0.2% to 1.400 million, better than the 1.3% decline expected, after an upwardly revised 2.1% drop in August, as multifamily rose 5.9% to 503,000, offsetting a 4.0% drop in single-family permits to 845,000, the lowest since March 2023.

Completions rose 2.2% to 1.192 million, but single-family completions were 840,000, the lowest since May 2020.

Preliminary weekly hiring report from ADP for the four weeks ending October 3rd fell for the first time since mid-August to +74k (+18.5k/wk), but only after upward revisions to the prior two weeks took the prior week to the highest since early June.

That takes the 4-week moving average to +80.7k, a seventh week of gains and the best since July 11th.

After Mondays bounce, Tech is lower in the premarket with the most recent pressure coming after Elice Inc., a $750 million Korean data center and AI developer saw its shares drop as much as 35% following its IPO (although they would recover much of those losses).

In a sharp reversal from the broad-based pile-in of recent years, global markets are now being much more selective and demanding with AI bets. “Elice’s disastrous debut is another confirmation that the era of ‘buy everything AI’ has given way to ‘question everything AI,’” said Hebe Chen, senior market analyst at Vantage Global.

Meanwhile, AI funder Softbanks credit-default swap level hit the highest among major Japanese companies.

Let’s try this again. We had a tech issue turning this on yesterday, but it’s live now!

Welcome to our new Stock Market Today feature. It’s a live market blog that we’ll be using for more immediate and lighter-weight content than many of our normal articles.

We hope you enjoy. Please feel free to leave a comment below and also note that you can continue the discussion on each entry by clicking the “Discuss This” button in each post. It’s a neat little feature our dev team added.

-Jason