How our calls did in October 2026: 11 hits, 12 misses

October was a month we would rather have finished the other way around. Of the 23 calls the track-record ledger scored during the month, 11 hit and 12 missed, a 47.8% hit rate that lands just short of our all-time average of 48.2% across 272 scored calls. Two calls were voided over the period, and seven new calls were filed. Because the month finished under 50 percent, we are leading this review with the misses.

The month's best call

The best call of October came from the macro desk. Sarah Chen made a bullish call on the SPDR Gold Shares ETF, GLD, on July 13, writing in our payrolls review: "the data supports a constructive outlook for gold over the medium term." That is the thesis verbatim. The call was filed with GLD at $367.13 and carried a 90-day horizon to October 11. At expiry the fund sat at $382.15, above the entry, and the call scored a hit. It came from our July labor market review, and its ledger card is here. The same desk's structural gold thesis, filed the same day against spot gold at $4,058.30, also closed a winner at $4,195.90 by expiry.

Related reading: How our calls did in September 2026: 100 hits, 107 misses.

The month's worst call

The month's worst call was David Morales's bullish uranium call of July 27, made in our piece on the offshore nuclear and Saudi oil landscape. The thesis, verbatim: "Both point the same direction for uranium." The Global X Uranium ETF, URA, was at $38.95 when the call was filed on a 90-day run to October 25. URA closed at $34.36 at expiry, down 11.8%, outside the plus-or-minus 2% neutral band, so the call scored a miss. It came from our uranium and oil review, and its ledger card is here.

Two more commodity misses deserve a plain acknowledgment. Bullish gold breakout calls filed September 3, one by David Morales and one by Sarah Chen, shared a benchmark of $4,477.20 and both expired at $4,167.60 when spot gold pulled back over the 30-day window. Neither recovered its entry by expiry.

For the broader framework, see our gold coverage.

Related reading: Jobless claims near a low at 194,000 as the Fed weighs a +29,000 payroll month on October 28.

Where the desk sits, analyst by analyst: Sarah Chen carried the month, going 5 for 6 on the macro desk, an 83.3% rate, with her only miss the September gold breakout call above. David Morales scored 6 commodity calls and went 2 and 4, a 33.3% rate, dragged down by the uranium miss and the shared gold pullback. James Nakamura had the toughest stretch, going 1 for 7, a 14.3% rate, and equities as a sector finished 1 for 7 overall. Priya Kapoor was strong in crypto, going 3 for 4, a 75% rate, the second-best sector line of the month behind macro.

Stated plainly, the misses shared two traits. They leaned bullish: every miss we reviewed was a directional call expecting an asset to rise, and in each case the price moved the other way by expiry. And they clustered in the two sectors already named: equities, where 6 of 7 calls missed, and commodities, where 4 of 6 missed. Macro and crypto, at 5 for 6 and 3 for 4, show the misses were not a company-wide problem. The accuracy gap in October lived in our directional commodity and equity calls, and that is the piece of the record we are watching going into November.

Every figure in this review comes from the monthly track-record file for October, and readers can pull the full ledger as a CSV or JSON file from export.csv or export.json.

This ledger is an accountability record, not a performance claim. The calls shown do not represent a portfolio or any investment product, hit rates ignore sizing, costs and timing, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.