Stock Market Live October 3: S&P 500 (VOO) Rises on Government Shutdown Day 3
By
Joel South
Oct 3, 2025 | Updated 12:52 PM ET
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Key Points
- The U.S. Government shut down on October 1 and remains shut down October 3, with up to 750,000 government workers furloughed.
- Absent government workers to confirm this data in reports, it’s hard to say precisely how many workers are off the job right now.
- Are you ahead, or behind on retirement? SmartAsset’s free tool can match you with a financial advisor in minutes to help you answer that today. Each advisor has been carefully vetted, and must act in your best interests. Don’t waste another minute; get started by clicking here.(Sponsor)
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Apple Still Shiny
In the absence of government news, Jefferies analyst Edison Lee is making headlines today downgrading Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) stock to underperform — but investors don’t care.
“We raised our FY25E/26E/27E iPhone unit growth to 7%/1%/-1% from 5%/-3%/0%,” explains Lee. “Our muted outlook for FY26/27 is driven by 1) $100 price hike for iPhone 18 P/PM, and 2) cautious outlook of 18 Fold (12.5m units).”
Lee lowered his price target on Apple stock to $205.16, but the stock is up 0.6% today. The Voo is up 0.5%.
This article will be updated throughout the day, so check back often for more daily updates.
The U.S. Government is out to lunch — and investors don’t care.
On Day 2 of the Government Shutdown of 2025, the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSEMKT: VOO) closed at a record high Thursday. As Day 3 prepares to get underway, the ETF is up another 0.1% premarket.
With much of the workforce at federal agencies furloughed today, and the rest presumably just trying to keep up with work on a skeleton crew, there’s no new government data coming out to help the market today — but also no bad news getting published. True, yesterday Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the shutdown threatens us with “a hit to the GDP, a hit to growth and a hit to working America,” but until some data comes out confirming that, it kind of feels like it’s not happening, and investors remain blissfully ignorant of anything bad that’s happening to the economy.
Well, except for one data point. Heading into the shutdown President Trump threatened massive layoffs of government workers, calling the shutdown an “unprecedented opportunity” to save money by cutting dead weight. And the Congressional Budget Office estimates we could see 750,000 federal employees furloughed, weighing on jobs data.
If we ever get to see any jobs data again, that is.
Predictions
In the absence of data, what we do have is forecasts, and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) CEO David Solomon just dropped a big one.
“Markets run in cycles,” said the Goldman CEO at Italian Tech Week in Turin, Italy, on Friday. “And whenever we’ve historically had a significant acceleration in a new technology that creates a lot of capital formation, and therefore lots of interesting new companies around it, you generally see the market run ahead of the potential … there are going to be winners and losers.”
Okay, give Solomon a ‘C’ for originality with that prediction. “Somewhere it’s going to rain today, and somewhere else it isn’t.” But the point remains true nonetheless. A lot of AI stocks have gotten very expensive this year, some of them are going to come back down, and investors should probably start to prepare for that eventuality.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next 12 to 24 months, we see a” stock market selloff, says Solomon.
I wouldn’t be surprised, either.