Good evening. Everyone got nervous about Big Tech's AI spending tonight, and it showed up everywhere at once. Meta beat earnings and got punished anyway, gold miners on the ASX had their worst session in months, and the big banks quietly picked up the money walking out of mining stocks.

Wall Street's AI rally broke on Thursday. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.6% to 26,008, its worst day since June, after Meta beat earnings estimates and still dropped about 7% once it lifted its 2026 capital spending plan to as much as US$145 billion, the ABC and Investrade report. The S&P 500 lost 1.2% to 7,663 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished flat at 52,866. Nvidia, AMD, Micron and CoreWeave all fell sharply with it, and China's CSI 300 index slid 20% below its June peak, meeting the common definition of a bear market, the ABC reports.

The ASX 200 barely moved on the surface, closing up just 2 points at 8,795.2, but that hid a sharp split underneath. Materials fell 3.8% and the index's gold-mining stocks dropped 5.6%, the worst sector on the day, after COMEX gold futures sank 2.2% overnight and Brent crude climbed to near US$114 a barrel, its highest since the Iran conflict began, pushing up diesel costs for miners, Marketindex and the ABC report. Money moved straight into the banks instead: Commonwealth Bank rose 4.3% to $164, Wesfarmers added 3.8% to $80.29, and NAB and Westpac both gained more than 3%, as investors treated financials as the safer trade.

Source: ABC News, 23 Oct 2026 → · Source: Marketindex, 23 Oct 2026 → · Source: Investrade, 22 Oct 2026 →

Zip Co sinks almost 30% after a US fraud hit. Buy-now-pay-later lender Zip Co closed down 29.5% at $1.46, after flagging a US fraud incident that cost roughly US$10.1 million and slowed customer growth, Marketindex and the ABC report. Citi flagged concerns about the company's onboarding controls, even though total transaction volume still grew 18% to US$4.6 billion over the period.

Snowy 2.0's cost blowout could reach $25 billion, a review finds. An independent review has found the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project could now cost up to $25 billion, about twelve times its original $2 billion estimate, with first power delayed to early 2029, the ABC reports. Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher blamed the blowout on the previous Coalition government; Shadow Energy Minister Dan Tehan called for Bowen to resign.

China's stock market slides into a bear market. China's CSI 300 index has fallen 20% from its June peak, as the same AI-spending jitters hitting Wall Street spread through Asia, the ABC reports. Japan's Nikkei fell 0.6% and South Korea's Kospi slipped 0.2%, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.8% against the regional trend.

Source: ABC News, 23 Oct 2026 → · Source: Marketindex, 23 Oct 2026 →

Eight thousand, seven hundred and ninety-five. That's where the ASX 200 closed tonight, basically unchanged from yesterday. On paper, a quiet day. Underneath, gold miners had one of their worst sessions in months and the big banks had one of their best, inside the same index, for the same reason: money spooked by Meta's AI spending bill went looking for safety, and on the ASX that meant selling miners and buying banks.

Meta's situation is the one worth sitting with. The company beat earnings, advertising revenue jumped 26%, and the stock still fell about 7%, because the market has decided that spending $145 billion a year on AI infrastructure is a risk now, not just a growth story. That's a real shift from where sentiment sat even a few weeks ago, and nobody's sure yet whether it's the right call.

Snowy 2.0 is the local version of the same anxiety, minus the AI. A $2 billion project is now a $25 billion one, and the government's first move was to blame the people who signed off on it originally rather than explain why nobody caught this sooner. Zip Co's bad day is smaller, but it's built the same way: a business that looked fine on paper until a cost nobody priced in showed up and took a third of its value with it in one session. The common thread tonight isn't any single headline. It's that the gap between what things were supposed to cost and what they actually cost just got expensive, all at once.

Those are your five minutes for tonight; see you at the same time tomorrow. — Miko Santos