Oil Fell Below 102 and Stocks Had Their Best Day Since August on UN-Week Hopes, a Trillion-Dollar AMD and a Meta Rally

Five days after the Federal Reserve raised rates and the Dow lost 631 points, the market found its reason to buy. Brent crude for November settled at 101.20 dollars on Monday, down 2.66 or 2.6 per cent, its lowest close in eleven days and its fourth fall in a row; West Texas Intermediate for October, expiring, settled at 97.80. Reuters' account, carried by RTE, gives two reasons. The first is diplomacy: the UN General Assembly opens this week, President Trump said he would be open to meeting Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in New York, and a US-convened meeting with Gulf, Iraqi, Jordanian and Egyptian officials on Iran is set for Tuesday. The second is that Saudi oil is moving. Aramco has been pushing crude through the Strait of Hormuz at an average of 2.9 million barrels a day over six days, against 700,000 a day in August, to make up for the Yanbu loadings it suspended when the East-West pipeline was shut. "Middle East oil flows remain surprisingly strong despite the disruption to Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline," JPMorgan's analysts wrote, calling the kingdom "the most notable pivot".

The risk premium comes off

Tim Waterer at KCM Trade told The National that "risk premium is being removed from oil prices on hopes that a diplomatic path to de-escalate" might open. Norbert Rücker at Julius Baer went further, saying "the supply disruption is less significant than feared" and holding a forecast of 77.50 dollars, which is a long way down from here. Aramco is still telling European customers it will not supply them next month, the pipeline is still shut, and a Houthi ballistic missile was intercepted over Riyadh at dawn on Saturday, which we report separately. None of that moved the price on Monday. Pezeshkian has not said he will meet Trump, and Iran's conditions, conveyed through mediators, have not changed.

Equities

The S&P 500 rose about 1.5 per cent and the Nasdaq 100 about 2.8 per cent, the best session since early August, and the reason was not oil. Meta Platforms closed at 741.25 dollars, up 11.43 per cent, its largest one-day gain since April 2025, after its Muse agent reached the top of Apple's US app chart and Wells Fargo's Ken Gawrelski raised his target from 640 to 796 dollars, writing that the company "now has a story to tell". The chipmakers followed for a reason the market has only just worked out: agents run long chains of sequential tasks, which is CPU work, not the parallel arithmetic that made Nvidia. Advanced Micro Devices rose 10 per cent and closed above a trillion dollars in market value for the first time; Intel gained 12 per cent, Arm 17, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index 4.3 per cent for a fifth straight rise. Our technology desk has the Muse story itself.

Rates and the rest

The ten-year Treasury yield slipped back below five per cent, the level it had reclaimed during Kevin Warsh's press conference on Wednesday, as oil fell and the inflation arithmetic softened at the margin. The dollar eased. Bitcoin went through 86,000 dollars, its highest since before the oil shock, on the same combination of lower yields and risk appetite, which is the pattern we described when it was at 77,000. The Fed's October meeting is five weeks away and the market's pricing of a second rise has not moved much; what moved on Monday was the belief that the war might stop adding to the problem. That belief will be tested in New York from Tuesday, when Xi Jinping also arrives for a three-day state visit, and on Wednesday when Meta holds its Connect conference and has to say what Muse does next.