USStockInsights

Money market funds hold a record $7.90 trillion, according to the Investment Company Institute's weekly report for the week ended October 28, 2026. But a dollar total cannot say whether cash is high or low; only a ratio can, and a ratio has two sides that have to be measured on the same date and from the same publisher. Rebuilt that way from the Federal Reserve's own releases, cash was 25.5% of the market value of domestic corporate equities at 2026:Q2 - the lowest reading in the 214 quarters since 1973, and lower than every quarter of the 2000 peak. This post takes that one number apart piece by piece, because an earlier version of it published here used a market-value figure of $79.7 trillion that does not appear in the Fed data it was credited to. The Federal Reserve Board's Eccles Building in Washington, D.C. - the source of the Z.1 and H.8 releases used below. Illustrative image. Photo: Federalreserve, Wikimedia Commons , public domain (U.S. government work) Key t...

The New York Stock Exchange -- credit spreads, traded in the bond market, often move before equity prices do. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons , public domain. Key takeaways The ICE BofA US High-Yield Option-Adjusted Spread closed at 3.44% on October 30, 2026 and 3.43% on November 2. That is not a 2026 high: the series printed 3.46% on March 30, 2026. The "29% in five weeks" framing depends entirely on which day you start from. Measured over the last 25 trading days to October 30 the rise is 17.4%, from 2.93% on September 25. Measured from the actual 2026 low - 2.60% on August 28, not 2.66% on September 21 - it is 32.3%, over two months rather than five weeks. Most of the move is two days old. The spread was 3.14% on October 28 and 3.44% on October 30, a 9.6% jump in two sessions after four straight sessions of narrowing. The 2008, 2016 and 2020 crisis peaks cannot be checked against this series any more. FRED's own series ...

Gold's record-breaking rally ended in the dead of winter, and the reversal hasn't let up since. Spot gold peaked at $5,589.38 per troy ounce on January 28, 2026, then fell roughly 30.7% to $3,875.84 by October 30, 2026 — a nine-month round trip from a fresh all-time high back to levels last seen before the final leg of its 2025–2026 run. The real question for anyone holding gold, a gold ETF, or shares in a gold miner isn't whether this counts as a correction; a decline past 20% from a peak already clears that bar on its own. It's whether this looks like any of the five genuine gold bear markets the World Gold Council has documented since 1974 — and on the one measure that matters most for sizing a position, speed, this one is already moving faster than every single one of them. That speed is the real headline here, not the size of the drop. A 30.7% decline is, so far, smaller than every one of the five historical bear markets detailed below. But reaching it in roughl...