Chips, AI and crypto took October's losses

October's sharp losses sat in quantum-computing funds and in funds tied to chips, artificial intelligence and crypto. Energy, staples, utilities and long Treasuries rose.

State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF SPY fell 0.9% from the Sept. 30 close to the Oct. 30 close. Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF RSP rose 4.9%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.7%. The Nasdaq Composite fell 5.3%. CNBC called that the Nasdaq's steepest month since March 2025.

Invesco QQQ Trust, Series 1 QQQ fell 6.7%. The cap-weighted loss sat in the largest growth stocks.

A theme is a group of funds with the same job. Each figure is the median fund's return from that Sept. 30 close to the Oct. 30 close, a center rather than a fund you can buy, on an adjusted close where one is available and on price where it is not. The ranking starts from 4,925 funds, sets aside 791 leveraged and inverse funds, and leaves out three themes too thin to rank.

Energy took the top three places. The fourth theme is nine funds that sell options on Tesla, in a month when the shares rose 12.7%. YieldMax Short TSLA Option Income Strategy ETF CRSH, a short-Tesla option fund, fell 9.6%, the worst of the nine.

Energy funds

West Texas Intermediate crude settled October at $104.12, up 15.2% from Sept. 30. CNBC said traders were bracing for a possible escalation in the Iran war after the Nov. 3 U.S. midterm elections, with a tanker attack in the Strait of Hormuz highlighting the supply risk. It also reported that Yemen's Houthis had stepped up attacks on Saudi oil sites.

State Street Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF XLE rose 13.9%. Every oil and gas producer fund in the ranking rose. The median gain in that group was 12.2%.

Refiners were the exception in the broader energy group. VanEck Oil Refiners ETF CRAK fell 1.9%, the worst fund there, against a median gain of 12.6%.

USCF United States Natural Gas Fund LP UNG, a fund of gas futures, fell 12.4%, the worst energy-futures fund. The group's median rose 12.3%.

Staples, utilities and long Treasuries

Staples funds rose together. The median gained 10.3%, and every fund in the group was up. State Street Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR ETF XLP rose 10.9%.

Utilities climbed with them. State Street Utilities Select Sector SPDR ETF XLU rose 10.1%, and every fund in the utilities group gained.

U.S. dividend-index funds rose with the staples. The median gain across 53 of them was 6.9%.

The gains reached past staples and utilities. Consumer discretionary funds rose 6.0% at the median, and funds in financials rose 5.0%.

Longer Treasury funds rose more than shorter ones. The 10-year Treasury yield fell from 5.29% on Sept. 30 to 4.94% on Oct. 30, a drop of 35 basis points.

The median fund in Treasuries of 20 years and longer rose 5.7%, the same result as iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF TLT. Treasury funds in the one-to-three-year range rose 0.9%. iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF AGG rose 2.3%.

Semiconductor, AI and crypto funds

Quantum-computing funds were the worst theme, down 23.3%. Crypto fills most of the rest of that table.

Bitcoin funds, in a group of their own, fell 8.2%. The spot-crypto row is a separate list of single-coin funds. A Hyperliquid fund in it rose 2.3%, and an HBAR fund fell 34.2%.

Semiconductor funds fell 19.3% at the median. The best fund in the group lost 11.8%. VanEck Semiconductor ETF SMH fell 14.2%.

Artificial-intelligence funds fell 11.4%, and the best of them lost 5.8%. AI data-infrastructure funds fell harder, down 15.8%. Roundhill Neocloud ETF NCLD, from Roundhill Investments, fell 35.3%, the worst fund in that group.

CNBC called the month rocky for the AI trade, with the focus on what companies spend to build it. Alphabet and Microsoft did not raise their capital-spending forecasts, it said.

CNBC described neocloud companies as the firms behind the infrastructure for AI data centers, and said they faced scrutiny over their debt. CoreWeave fell 37% in October and Nebius almost 35%, it said.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 30 that the tech selloff intensified after results from Amazon and Intel compounded worries around the AI trade.

The month rewarded energy, staples, utilities and long Treasuries, and it punished chips, AI computing and crypto. Anyone who owns the chip funds, the AI funds and the crypto funds has the decision October poses: whether one month of that cost changes the portfolio. One month cannot answer it.