morning-brief

Base Camp — Friday, September 25, 2026

Jeffrey Mansell

Jeffrey Mansell

— 3 min read
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Your premarket read — what moved overnight, and what it means for long-term investors. A 3-minute brief from Kodiak Capital Advisors.

The Setup

The 10-year Treasury yield touched roughly 5.16% yesterday, its highest since 2007. That number, not the stock tape, is the story of this week, and probably of the next several.

Stocks

Futures are modestly higher this morning: S&P 500 up about 0.2%, the Dow about 0.1%, Nasdaq-100 futures the strongest at roughly 0.4%. That follows a Thursday session that whipped through two reversals and ended almost exactly where it started, the S&P 500 at 7,704, down a tenth of a percent; the Dow off 162 points; the Nasdaq Composite up three. The Dow is on track for a fourth consecutive losing week.

Here's the part that gets lost in a streak of red headlines: the S&P 500 is still up about 12.5% for the year and the Nasdaq about 15.9%. A four-week drift lower from record highs isn't a break in the market. It's what a market looks like when it's digesting something.

Rates & The Fed

What it's digesting is rates. The 30-year Treasury yield reached 5.44%, its highest since 2004, and the 2-year, the maturity that tracks Fed policy most closely, sits near 4.89%, easing slightly this morning. The cause is less alarming than the levels suggest: this looks like an economy that won't slow down rather than an inflation scare. S&P Global's flash surveys on Wednesday showed the strongest U.S. business activity in more than five years. Traders responded by lifting the odds of another Fed increase in October from roughly 55% to about 70%, with the target range already at 3.75%–4.00%.

Plain English: mortgages, commercial loans and business credit lines stay expensive. Bonds you already own get marked down as newly issued ones pay more. And cash, Treasury bills and new bonds are offering the most generous yields in about two decades.

Commodities & The Dollar

Brent crude, the global benchmark, is near $105 a barrel and WTI around $92, both firmer on continued Middle East tension. That's showing up at the pump, where the national average is approaching $4.50, a real line item for anyone running vehicles or a fleet, and a complication for a Fed watching inflation. Gold is hovering near $4,300 an ounce after slipping modestly.

What It Means For You

For fifteen years, the risk-free rate was essentially zero, and every investment decision was quietly built on that assumption. It isn't zero anymore. When a Treasury bond pays north of 5%, safe assets are genuinely competing for your money again, and that repricing is exactly what the last four weeks of equity softness has been about.

The instinct is to treat this as a signal to do something dramatic. We'd suggest the opposite. The useful response to a higher-rate world isn't a trade; it's a review, of how much cash you're holding and what it's earning, of where your bond maturities sit, of whether your stock-and-bond mix still matches the plan you wrote rather than the market you had. Those are structural questions with durable answers, and they don't require guessing what the 10-year does next. General commentary only; nothing here is a view on any specific security.

On Deck Today

  • Durable goods orders (August), 8:30 a.m. ET — expected up about 0.9%. Another firm reading feeds the same "economy is accelerating" story that's driving yields.
  • University of Michigan consumer sentiment, final September, 10:00 a.m. ET — consensus near 51.7, historically depressed. Watch the 5-year inflation expectation, seen at 3.3%; the Fed watches that line closely.
  • Three Fed speakers — Williams, Schmid and Hammack — with the market hunting for any hint about October.
  • Looking ahead: GDP and the PCE inflation index land Wednesday, and the September jobs report follows on Friday, October 2. Next week carries far more weight than this one.

A note from Kodiak

Markets give you a new reason to react every single morning. Our job is to help you tune out the noise and keep your plan on track. If you'd like a second opinion on how today's headlines fit your portfolio, book a 15-minute intro call →.

Written by Jeffrey Mansell, Kodiak Capital Advisors, LLC.

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