The stock market stumbled this week as big bank earnings offered little support and a hotter-than-expected September inflation report revived concerns about an autumn interest-rate hike.

And with tech earnings, a Federal Reserve meeting and November's midterm elections approaching, the market's record-setting pace is starting to look strained heading into the final stretch of the year.

The S&P 500, despite its recent record highs, has gained just 3.3% over the past five months, based on Wednesday's opening price, equivalent to a monthly advance of around 0.65%. Annualized and adjusted for September's 3.7% inflation rate, that would translate into a real gain of roughly 4.3%.

With 10-year Treasury yields jumping to 5.312% following the CPI report, that paper-thin real equity risk premium offers investors precious little compensation for holding stocks into an uncertain year-end.

"Inflation pressures are broadening beyond energy, suggesting the last mile back to target could remain bumpy and keep interest rates elevated," said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial.

"The latest report complicates the Fed's decision this month, as the road back to price stability is looking increasingly difficult to navigate," he added.

Finding stock gains to overcome that inflation arithmetic is also becoming harder.

Wall Street's six biggest banks, which account for much of the $120 billion in profits analysts were looking for from the financial sector this quarter, wrapped up a mixed set of reports on Wednesday with more of a whimper than a bang.

Bank of America, which was hit with a $1.25 billion fine for money laundering and sanctions violations this week, traded at a five-month low, while the broader KBW banking sector index has fallen some 15% over the past two months.

Other pillars of the market are also starting to wobble, with chip stocks falling for sixth straight day, the longest losing streak since July, dragging the PHLX Semiconductor Index into a month-to-date decline of around 5.2%.

That likely adds significant pressure on the tech sector to both top Wall Street's elevated third-quarter earnings forecasts, which call for collective profits equal to around 50% of the $774 billion the entire S&P 500 is expected to generate, and forecast even better gains heading into the end of the year and beyond.

Lori Calvasina, head of U.S. equity strategy research at RBC Capital Markets, however, is starting to see some fatigue in the sector, downgrading it to "market weight" from "overweight" heading into the third-quarter reporting season.

"We remain concerned about the possibility of a 5% to 10% pullback in the S&P 500 and note that Tech tends to lag in the pullbacks that have been seen around the start of past Fed hiking cycles, even though it tends to outperform over the duration of the hiking cycles" she said.

The odds of an October Fed interest-rate hike, which had tumbled over the past few weeks, are now around 42%, according to the CME Group's FedWatch, and analysts are now wondering if the Fed is about to embark on a multi-hike cycle over the coming months.

"Markets now expect at least two hikes by March, with a better than 70% probability of a third," said Johnathan Owen, portfolio manager at TwentyFour Asset Management. "That leaves little room for the cuts some had hoped for in 2027, and any easing now looks contingent on energy prices rolling over."

With Brent crude now approaching $106 a barrel, a 25% increase from midsummer, and futures contracts suggesting prices won't return to levels seen before the U.S.-Iran war until 2030, that kind of near-term easing seems unlikely.

But tech stocks in general, and the Magnificent Seven market leaders in particular, have been largely insulated from Fed interest-rate hike concerns, with the latter taking on a defensive tenor over the autumn months and rising more than 7.2% since the start of September.

Sonu Varghese, chief macro strategist at Carson Group, noted this resilience in a recent report that paralleled the Fed's rate hiking cycle in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when tech stocks ignored the Fed until they couldn't.

"In 1999, booming tech investment seemed to have broken the old rules of monetary policy, It hadn't," he said. "The hikes took longer to work and hit housing first, and when the boom ended, it ended quickly."

"So far, AI is following a similar script," he added. "We can't time the top, so we're watching for signs that expected returns are slipping."

If those signs emerge in megacap tech earnings later this month, ahead of midterm elections that could leave Washington gridlocked for the next two years, markets might find the remaining autumn hurdles extremely difficult to clear.