S&P 500 ends higher as traders shift from AI to healthcare

S&P 500 ends higher as traders shift from AI to healthcare

By Noel Randewich and Sruthi Shankar

Thu October 15, 2026  

PPI came in today with the worst increase in 4-1/2 years providing even more fuel to Wednesday’s hot CPI readings on the inflation. This further aggravated all the concerns about inflation, particularly with the AI stocks which, with the prospect of higher interest rates, would be seriously impacted due to their extraordinary debt loads. So there was a rotation back to standard industrials which saw the Dow skyrocket 556 points while the tech indexes both tanked, the Nasdaq diving almost 400 points at open but gradually recovering these losses to even see a little green by close.  

Tech giants Dell and HP suffered the heaviest losses while the rotation benefited healthcare and pharma. The chip index fell for a seventh consecutive session, this time nearly 1% again. The unwelcome inflation numbers have today pushed the October rate hike odds to 67% vs Wednesday’s 62% and last week’s 17%. But today’s expert put things in perspective, “You’ve got a little rotation going on with the bigger names, but we’ve seen this before. It seems to crop up every couple of months and we have the AI concerns.” Volume was heavy, well above the 17.6 average, closing at 20.7 billion. 

DJ: 51,621.48  -48.61        NAS: 26,692.87  -511.51        S&P: 7,718.94  -86.51            10/14

DJ: 52,177.69  +556.21     NAS: 26,713.03  +20.16         S&P: 7,744.06  +25.12            10/15

Thu 10-15-26 4:50 pm S&P 500 ends higher as traders shift from AI to healthcare | Reuters