WALL STREET'S OCTOBER ENDS IN A BLOODBATH AS AI SPENDING PANIC TORCHES TECH

Wall Street closed out October with a brutal selloff on Friday, October 30, as worries about runaway artificial intelligence spending boiled over into a full-blown tech rout. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.86% on the day, its worst session since June, while the S&P 500 dropped 1.82% and the Dow slid 572 points, or roughly 1.1%.

The damage capped a miserable month for tech. The Nasdaq is now down 7.8% from its record high earlier in October and just posted its worst monthly decline since March 2025, wiping out a chunk of this year's AI-fueled gains.

Chipmakers took the heaviest fire. Intel plunged 28.58% on Friday — its worst day since 1974 and second-worst on record — after a grim fourth-quarter outlook, and a closely watched index of chipmakers sank 7.2%. Nvidia fell 4.2%, and social media firm Reddit dropped about 29%.

The pain spread well beyond tech. Gold fell 3.5% and silver dropped 6%, while oil prices rose about 2% amid Middle East tensions. Financial stocks were also hit hard, with Goldman Sachs down 4% and Jefferies off 6%.

The selloff followed a bruising week for the biggest names in AI. Alphabet had already lost more than 12% on Thursday, wiping roughly half a trillion dollars off Google's parent company, and both Alphabet and Meta are now in bear-market territory, down more than 20% from their peaks.