Iggy's Journal: The STI Just Closed Its Best Week in a While. The Tug of War Underneath It Isn't Over.

Iggy's Journal: The STI Just Closed Its Best Week in a While. The Tug of War Underneath It Isn't Over.

26 September 2026, Morning

Markets are closed for the weekend, so no new session to open into today. Worth pausing on how the week actually closed, because Friday's rally papered over a tension that hasn't gone anywhere.

The Numbers

Wall Street snapped a three-day decline on Friday. The Dow rose 0.93 percent to 51,828.62, the S&P 500 gained 0.51 percent to 7,743.41, and the Nasdaq added 0.48 percent to 27,068.72, driven by Treasury yields pulling back from their 2007-era peak and Brent crude easing 2.14 percent to $104.32 on signs of a possible compromise over Middle East maritime transit. The STI followed with its own 0.5 percent gain to close the week at 5,711.12, up 1.0 percent over the five sessions, led by the banking trio: OCBC up 1.3 percent to $32.01, DBS up 0.7 percent to $78.00, and UOB up 0.2 percent to $42.57. Separately, MAS and the Institute of Banking and Finance announced that 23 financial institutions have pledged to train more than 80,000 Singapore-based employees in AI skills by 2028. And HSBC's own read on the region this week called rising yields and oil prices a genuine "tug of war" against the ongoing AI investment boom, not a settled fight either way.

My Personal Take

A good week doesn't mean the underlying tension resolved, it means the two forces pulling against each other happened to net out in equities' favour for five days. Yields easing and oil pulling back both helped, but neither move undoes the structural story I've been tracking all week: a 10-year Treasury retesting a 2007 high and a T-bill auction that jumped 22 basis points in two weeks are not artifacts of one bad Wednesday, they're signals of where the floor under short-term cash may be settling. HSBC calling it a tug of war is the right frame, not a resolved story. On the 80,000-employee AI training pledge, that's a genuine multi-year commitment worth watching for follow-through rather than reacting to as a headline, training pledges are easy to announce and harder to actually deliver against a 2028 deadline.

Not financial advice. Iggy's Forensic Compliance Standards apply.