Friday, October 30, gave traders a rare sight: almost everything fell at once. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.86% to 25,437, its largest fall since June and its worst month since March 2025, while the S&P 500 lost 1.82% to 7,580.07 and the Dow slipped 1.09% to 51,770.31, per Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. Bitcoin slid about 3% to a low near $76,300, gold futures fell 3.3% to $3,885.70 an ounce, and silver dropped about 6%. One session, four asset classes, one direction.

Four separate shocks landed in the same week, and their overlap is what made the day so broad. None of them alone explains a selloff that swept stocks, crypto, gold and silver together. Taken as a group, they do.

Key points

  • The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.86% to 25,437 on October 30, with the Nasdaq 100 down 3.5% and near a 10% correction from its high, per Reuters.
  • Intel fell about 29% after weak fourth-quarter guidance, its largest one-day fall since 1974, while Reddit fell 29% and Sandisk 13%, per Reuters.
  • The record $6.3 billion Binance hack drained crypto sentiment and fed more than $1.5 billion in liquidations, per Reuters and blockchain firms.
  • Brent crude traded above $117 a barrel as Hormuz tanker attacks lifted inflation fears and December rate-hike bets, per Reuters.
  • US Treasury yields fell on the day, with the 10-year near 4.94%, which runs against any claim of a Treasury dump driving the selloff.
  • China held $590.7 billion of US Treasuries in August 2026, the lowest since 2008, after a decade-long gradual decline, per US Treasury data.

AI earnings reset the trade

Earnings season turned into a cash-flow test for the companies building artificial intelligence, and several failed it in the eyes of the market. Intel forecast fourth-quarter revenue growth short of Wall Street targets and pointed to a prolonged slowdown in personal-computer sales, per The Wall Street Journal. Its stock fell about 29% to $65.76, the largest decline since 1974.

Amazon added to the same worry with rising AI expenditure plans and slowing advertising revenue growth, per The Wall Street Journal and The Economic Times. Alphabet had already dropped about 12% on October 29 after its own heavy capital spending print. Microsoft and Meta fell 1% to 2% on Friday after sliding earlier in the week, per Reuters.

Capital Economics put the scale of the bet in one line, quoted by Reuters: the four hyperscalers account for more than a third of all capital spending by current S&P 500 members over the past 12 months, and that share looks set to rise. When spending of that size starts to rely on outside financing, investors ask harder questions about payback. Chip stocks led the retreat, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor index down 7.2%, and financial shares joined in, with Goldman Sachs down 4% and Jefferies down 6%, per Reuters.

The Binance hack hit crypto at the same time

Crypto had its own shock running alongside the equity selloff. About $6.3 billion left Binance wallets in roughly 20 minutes late on October 29, according to blockchain firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis, per Reuters. Binance kept deposits and withdrawals shut on Friday and repeated that company funds will cover customer losses.

Rival venues spent Friday hardening their own defenses, as MarketRadar reported the same day. Traders still pulled back: Bitcoin fell below $77,000 for the first time in over a month, ether slid about 4% toward $2,220, and liquidations across crypto passed $1.5 billion in 24 hours, with longs accounting for more than 80% of the total. The hack did not cause the stock selloff, but it removed the one bid that might have cushioned crypto while equities fell.

Oil above $117 added an inflation leg

A third leg came from crude. Brent's December contract traded at $117.75, up 2.5%, and touched $118 intraday, while WTI reached $104.79, up 2.7%, per Reuters. Tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, with 30 or more vessels hit in October, kept supply risk priced in even as crude kept flowing through the strait.

Dear oil feeds straight into inflation expectations, and inflation expectations feed into rate bets. September consumer prices ran at 3.7% year on year, with core at 2.6%, and the Federal Reserve had held rates at 3.75% to 4.00% on October 28 in a 10-2 vote. By Friday, traders priced a December hike at roughly 72% to 80%, and Fed officials Musalem and Logan argued the same day for further hikes. For gold, a non-yielding asset, higher hike odds are a direct headwind.

Why gold fell with stocks

Gold falling on a risk-off day puzzles readers who treat it as a refuge, but Friday had two mechanics working against it. First, crowded longs got sold to cover equity losses: gold futures had closed 27% below their January high even before Friday, after a long speculative run earlier in the year, per The Wall Street Journal. Second, the oil-driven rise in hike bets lifted the dollar and real-rate expectations, which punish bullion.

Silver showed the same pattern harder, down about 6% on the day to near $49.10 and down 31% for 2026, per Reuters. Treasuries, by contrast, did what refuges do: they rallied. The 10-year yield ended near 4.94%, down on the day and down about 35 basis points across October, its largest monthly fall since December 2023. Money moved into bonds, not out of them.

China and Treasuries: what the record shows

Social media chatter tied the selloff to China selling US Treasuries. The market record points the other way on the day itself, and the longer record tells a slower story.

US Treasury data for August 2026, released on October 16, put China-attributed holdings at $590.7 billion, down from $618.0 billion in July and $699.7 billion a year earlier. That is the lowest since 2008, and China now ranks third among foreign holders, behind Japan at $1,068 billion and the UK at $1,010 billion. Total foreign holdings rose $83.3 billion in the month to $9,331.7 billion.

Zoom out and the decline stretches back more than a decade: holdings peaked near $1,320 billion in November 2013, fell to $867.1 billion in 2022, $816.3 billion in 2023, roughly $760 billion to $768 billion in 2024, and $683.5 billion in December 2025. A San Francisco Fed paper released on September 28 described the same trend, noting China has trimmed holdings since the late 2000s to diversify reserves, while stablecoin issuers have added about $200 billion of Treasury holdings over five years.

Three facts stop the rumor from fitting October 30. Yields fell that day, the opposite of what a large seller produces. No official data for October exists yet: the September figures arrive on November 18, and Treasury data is custody-based, so it cannot by itself prove who sold what. And the Bloomberg report about Chinese regulators advising banks to limit Treasury purchases dates to February 2026, not October, and it did not apply to state holdings; UBS economist Paul Donovan noted at the time that Chinese banks are not major players in the Treasury market.

A separate, unconfirmed Bloomberg account from October suggested China may route some holdings through custodians elsewhere, with Canada's broader debt securities near $600 billion. That claim has no direct evidence, and officials declined to comment. It is a question for the November data, not an explanation for Friday.

MarketRadar take

Friday reads as a collision of four priced risks rather than a single hidden seller: AI payback doubts, a record crypto theft, an oil shock, and a Fed that sounds in no hurry to cut. Each leg is documented; the China-dump version of the day is not. Until the November data lands, the honest label for the Treasury story is a decade-long diversification trend, not a trigger.

What to watch

  • November 2: Apple earnings, the next hyperscaler cash-flow test.
  • November 3: US midterm elections, with attention on whether Iran tensions ease or escalate after the vote.
  • November 6: US payrolls; November 10: consumer prices; November 13: producer prices.
  • November 17: Nvidia earnings; November 18: September Treasury holdings data.
  • December 8-9: Federal Reserve meeting with a new dot plot.