Stock Market News for Oct 5, 2026

Weak jobs data lit a fire under equities Friday. September nonfarm payrolls rose just 29,000, far below the 79,000 consensus, and the unemployment rate climbed to 4.2%. Stocks closed higher anyway.

The Nasdaq Composite led, gaining 1.2%. The S&P 500 added 0.7% and the Dow advanced 0.5%. The tech-heavy tilt of the gains matters for anyone holding ONEQ, which tracks the Nasdaq Composite, and for large-cap networking names like CSCO that sit inside that benchmark.

The market's reaction points to a bad-news-is-good-news trade. Investors read the payroll miss as a reason to expect the Federal Reserve to hold rates in the 3.75%-4.00% range rather than tighten policy. That is interpretation, not a stated Fed signal: the data increased expectations of a hold, and equities rewarded it.

The size of the miss is notable. Actual job creation came in at roughly 37% of the forecast, a gap of 50,000 jobs. With unemployment at 4.2%, labor-market softening is now a live input to rate expectations, and the Nasdaq's 1.2% outperformance versus the Dow's 0.5% shows where traders chose to place that bet.