Stocks fall on Thursday as Alphabet drops 12 percent, a day after the Fed held rates and pointed toward December

Thursday's market ran in the opposite direction from the three sessions before it. The Nasdaq Composite fell 1.4 percent, and the S and P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average each fell 0.3 percent, as of the October 29 close. Alphabet drove the decline. Its shares fell more than 12 percent after the company reported revenue of 127.6 billion dollars that missed what analysts expected, with free cash flow negative by 9.1 billion dollars. Google Cloud revenue more than doubled, but weaker search advertising and the cost of the AI build out outweighed it. Caterpillar fell more than 9 percent and weighed on the Dow. Microsoft moved the other way, rising about 3 percent after hours on Wednesday after Azure revenue grew 48 percent and free cash flow reached 18.6 billion dollars.

The backdrop is the Federal Reserve. On Wednesday the rate setting committee voted 10 to 2 to hold the benchmark rate at 3.75 to 4 percent. Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack wanted a quarter point increase instead. The committee upgraded its description of the economy's pace to strong and repeated that inflation remains elevated. Chair Kevin Warsh called the decision a hawkish skip and said politics played no role in it, six days before the midterm elections. The Fed raised rates by a quarter point in September, its first increase in three years.

Fresh data on Thursday gave the committee material in both directions. The September Personal Consumption Expenditures price index came in slightly cooler than economists expected, and third quarter GDP growth beat forecasts. Traders still expect the Fed to move in December. The CME FedWatch measure put the likelihood of at least a quarter point increase at about 80 percent, as of October 29. The 10 year Treasury yield sat near 4.95 percent, down from late Wednesday, and Bitcoin traded near 80,200 dollars after overnight highs near 81,700 dollars.