Brian Stewart, Seeking Alpha's Director of News, happy Halloween for those celebrating.

If you are, there are so many puns to be had, I think it's best.

As I welcome you to the end of October, if you share with us where your mind is at these days,

what you're most focused on this week going into next week.

Yeah, it was a busy week this week.

We had a bunch of earnings, pretty much the part of the earning season this past week.

And then we had the Fed meeting.

Let's start with the Fed meeting, I guess.

They lowered interest rates by a quarter percentage point, which is exactly what people expected them to do is highly anticipated.

However, the information coming out of the meeting showed that the Fed is highly anticipated. However, the information coming out of the meeting

showed that the Fed is highly divided in terms of where policy should go. So there were two

dissenting votes on the Fed's policy setting committee, one who wanted to cut rates by a full

half percentage point, and then another who didn't want

to cut rates at all. So that just underlines the complications that are going on within the Fed.

So they're kind of torn between the worry about inflation, which is still hovering around

3%. The Fed's target is 2%. And the fear that the economy is starting to slow down, especially the labor

market.

We've seen some layoff announcements, major layoff announcements recently.

I think the most high profile one was Amazon.

We said it was cutting 14,000 corporate jobs.

So there were reports that that could eventually reach as much as 30,000.

So you have this concern about the underlying economy, but you also have this lingering

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