The Week in Data, Sep 28 to Oct 4: An October Hike Priced Out, the Long End Unmoved

The week turned on one data release. US payrolls grew 29,000 in September against an 84,000 forecast, and Polymarket's odds of an October Federal Reserve rate hike fell 53 points in seven days, to 16.5%. Bitcoin closed the week at $86,510.40 on Kraken, up 2.45%, and nearly the whole gain arrived in Sunday's candle alone.

The bond market did not play along. The front end priced the hike out and the long end sold off anyway. Three month bills gave back 5 basis points on the week while the 30 year yield added 14, to 5.63%. That is not a market relaxing about inflation. That is a market asking to be paid for it.

Markets

Kraken daily candles, Monday Sep 28 to Sunday Oct 4, UTC:

Asset	Week open	Week close	High	Low	Change
BTC	$84,444.20	$86,510.40	$87,229.00	$82,566.40	+2.45%
ETH	$2,688.02	$2,726.49	$2,776.46	$2,635.57	+1.43%
SOL	$121.98	$121.57	$123.74	$116.33	-0.34%

The shape matters more than the percentages. All three highs printed Friday Oct 2, the day the jobs report landed, and all three lows came in the first two sessions of the week. Through Saturday bitcoin was up just 0.35%; Sunday's session added 2.09% on its own. Our bitcoin ticker carries the live quote.

Spot bitcoin ETFs took in $241.08 million net across the week, a third straight positive week but roughly 90% below the prior week's $2.39 billion, per Bitcoin.com's reading of the daily flow data. The week's only outflow day was Wednesday Sep 30 at $148.69 million; the largest inflow, $189.84 million, came Friday after the payrolls print. Money kept arriving, in much smaller size.

Sentiment drifted down inside Greed without ever leaving it. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index from Alternative.me read 74, 73, 71, 74, 72, 67 and 65 from Monday to Sunday: high 74, low 65, Greed every day. The latest print is 70. The index explainer covers how it is built.

US equities split. SPY closed Friday Oct 2 at $769.64, down 0.22% against the prior Friday; QQQ closed at $749.58, up 0.68%. Both did their work in one session: SPY rose 0.74% and QQQ 1.01% on jobs day, which was most of what either index had to show for the week.

The Treasury par yield curve, Oct 2 against Sep 25:

Tenor	Sep 25	Oct 2	Change
3-month	4.24%	4.19%	-5 bps
1-year	4.50%	4.46%	-4 bps
2-year	4.81%	4.83%	+2 bps
10-year	5.17%	5.28%	+11 bps
30-year	5.49%	5.63%	+14 bps

The 2s10s spread widened from 36 to 45 basis points, a second consecutive week of steepening driven entirely by the long end. The front end is reading the labor market: the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised July and August down by a combined 60,000 jobs, unemployment sits at 4.2%, and average hourly earnings rose 0.1% in September for a 3.0% annual rate. The Fed raised its target range to 3.75% to 4.00% on Sep 16. Markets now think that was the last one for a while, and the 30 year is pricing the consequence. Our treasury yield explainer reads the curve.

Positioning

Hyperliquid perpetuals held $13.32 billion of open interest across 178 markets at the time of writing, flat over 24 hours at -0.05%. Bitcoin and ether were effectively the same size book: BTC at $3.25 billion, or 37,646 BTC, down 1.05% on the day; ETH at $3.22 billion, or 1.19 million ETH, down 2.59%. Hourly funding on both read 0.00125%, the neutral baseline, so the week's move was not a leveraged chase. HYPE itself was the third largest book at $1.92 billion, and Zcash the fifth at $641 million.

Ether lost ground to bitcoin despite closing green. The ETH/BTC ratio finished the week at 0.03152 against 0.03183 the Sunday before, down 0.99%, and reads 0.031496 at the time of writing, near the bottom of a 30 day range of 0.030829 to 0.033196. The ETH page has the live cross.

Prediction markets

Polymarket's October Fed ladder was the week's biggest repricing anywhere on the dashboard. At the time of writing "no change" trades at 82.5%, a 53 point gain over seven days, while a 25 basis point hike sits at 16.5%, down 53 points. A cut is priced at 0.45%. Volume followed the move: $3.36 million on the hold leg over the week against $2.48 million on the hike.

Elsewhere, Brazil voted Oct 4 in a first round that sends the top two candidates to an Oct 25 runoff if nobody clears half the valid votes, and the presidential markets moved hard into the vote: Flávio Bolsonaro at 84.7%, up 26.8 points on the week, against Lula at 14.5%, down 27. "Will Ethereum dip to $2,250 by December 31" fell 9 points to 22.5%. "Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by December 31" slipped 5 points to 18.5%, the kind of quiet repricing that shows up in oil before it shows up anywhere else. Our prediction market explainer covers how to read these prices.

The planet

A genuinely quiet week. USGS counted 130 earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or greater between Sep 28 and Oct 4, of which just five reached M5.5 and none reached M6.0. The largest was an M5.9 at 46 km depth, 39 km west southwest of Tambolaka, Indonesia, on Oct 3 at 22:55 UTC, which GDACS put at 130,000 people exposed to shaking intensity V. Next came an M5.8 south southeast of Vilyuchinsk, Russia on Oct 2, then two M5.6 events on Sep 30, south of Yonakuni, Japan and southwest of Tamarindo, Costa Rica. An M5.4 west of Port McNeill, Canada on Sep 28 carried a tsunami flag.

GDACS opened 40 alerts inside the window and every one of them was Green: 27 wildfire notifications, 8 flood alerts, 3 earthquakes and 2 tropical cyclones, with no named storm registering any population at Category 1 winds or above. The only Orange entries on the feed are multi month drought assessments that began as far back as December 2025, so they are not this week's news. The Smithsonian Weekly Volcanic Activity Report was unreachable at the time of writing, returning a site unavailable page, so we have no volcano data for this recap.

Space

Four orbital launches flew during the week and all four were SpaceX, a clean sweep that does not happen often. Starship opened the week on Sep 28 with Flight 14 from Orbital Launch Pad 2, carrying Starlink Group 31-1. Oct 1 brought two Falcon 9s: Crew-13 from SLC-40 and the Transporter 18 rideshare from SLC-4E. Falcon Heavy closed it out on Oct 2 with NROL-97 from LC-39A. The Space Devs logged all four as successes and recorded no other launch inside the window.

The internet

Cloudflare had the loudest week, opening 14 incidents on its status page between Sep 28 and Oct 4, including one rated critical: a CDN error spike on Oct 2 that ran from 21:46 to 21:57 UTC, eleven minutes. GitHub posted four, among them a critical outage of Copilot Code Review on Sep 28 lasting 52 minutes. OpenAI posted seven, the worst a major incident on Oct 1 that took down login, signup and ads for 53 minutes. Claude's status page logged two, including a major error spike across claude.ai, Claude Code and the API on Sep 29.

On our side, the feed drift check saw 114 of 116 sources live at the time of writing, 2 idle and none stalled. The status page shows the current state.

The week ahead

Tue Oct 6: SpaceX Falcon 9 launches SDA Tranche 1 Transport Layer A, listed Go.
Wed Oct 7: Korea Aerospace Research Institute flies Nuri with NeonSat-2 through 6, listed Go.
Fri Oct 9: A Long March 12 from CASC, payload undisclosed, listed Go.
Sat Oct 10: Falcon 9 with Starlink Group 15-25.
Tue Oct 13: Falcon 9 with Dragon CRS-2 SpX-35 to the space station.
Wed Oct 14: September CPI from the BLS at 8:30am ET, the last inflation print before the Oct 27 and 28 FOMC meeting.

The live board runs all of it as it happens.