> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.sharespective.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A Point Short - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-08-14/ - Published: 2026-08-13T22:03:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-14T05:23:19.000Z - Description: Bill Ackman has bought Netflix again, four years after it cost him a fortune. - Author: Shaun Botha - Tags: Daily | ![Sharespective](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/mark-light-3.png) | SharespectiveWall street, before your first coffee | Fri 14 Aug 2026Issue 227 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------ | | ![Today's edition](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/kicker-1.png)A Point ShortPlus: Bill Ackman has bought Netflix again, four years after it cost him a fortune. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | **Good morning, and welcome to Friday.** The S&P 500 spent part of Thursday afternoon in New York above 7,800, a level it had never touched before, running as high as 7,808.42\. Then it closed at 7,798.99\. A point and change short of the round number, which ruins a headline and bothers nobody who owns the index. It got there on a wholesale inflation report softer than anyone had written down, a day after a consumer report that landed exactly on forecast. Back in late June, JPMorgan lifted its year-end target for the index to 7,800\. The market took seven weeks to get there, then declined to finish the job. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,798.99▲ 0.65% | ​ | NASDAQ26,803.03▲ 0.81% | ​ | NZX 5013,825.30▲ 0.64% | | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2009,188.0▼ 0.23% | ​ | USD/NZD1.7099▲ 0.19% | ​ | USD/AUD1.4174▲ 0.10% | US levels are Thursday's official 4​pm New York close. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Thursday's local closes, hours before New York opened; currency levels were taken late in Thursday's New York session. | ​ | ECONOMY | | - | ------- | ## Wholesale prices didn't move at all in July, and the September rate rise got harder to argue for The producer price index was flat over the month against expectations of a 0.2% rise, and 4.7% higher than a year earlier, down from 5.5% in June. Strip out food and energy and it rose 0.2%, under the 0.3% pencilled in. The 10-year Treasury yield fell more than five hundredths of a percentage point to 4.641%, and the two-year did much the same, landing at 4.145%. **What the producer index actually measures.** It tracks what businesses receive at the point of sale, before anything reaches a shop shelf, so it tends to move ahead of the consumer numbers. Goods did the heavy lifting, falling 0.7% as energy dropped 3.1% and petrol slid 5.7%. Services rose 0.2%. The same morning brought jobless claims of 209,000 for the week to 8 August, up 9,000 and above the 202,000 expected, though continuing claims fell by 22,000 to 1.78 million. Futures traders cut the odds of a rate rise in September to about a third, from close to half earlier in the week. The Federal Reserve has had two inflation reports in two days and neither gave it a reason to move, which is what the record close was celebrating. | The open questionwhether July's softness is the energy shock from the Iran conflict fading or demand genuinely cooling. Both leave the same fingerprint on a price index, but the second shows up in the labour market first, and claims are drifting up rather than down. | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | MEDIA | | - | ----- | ## Bill Ackman is back in Netflix, four years after the last attempt cost him US$400 million Netflix rose 5.43% to US$78.24 on Thursday, one of the biggest contributions to the Nasdaq's day, after Pershing Square disclosed a new holding of about 3.15 million shares in its second-quarter filing. The fund also opened positions in Visa, Mastercard, S&P Global, Intercontinental Exchange and the eye-care company Alcon. **Why this one is awkward.** In early 2022 Pershing Square put more than US$1 billion into Netflix at around US$400 a share. Three months later, after the first fall in subscribers in more than a decade, it sold out at roughly US$225 and booked a loss above US$400 million. Those are pre-split prices — Netflix did a ten-for-one split in November 2025, so Thursday's US$78.24 is US$782 in the old money. The pitch this time is that the fight is over. Pershing Square argues Netflix has won streaming outright, that revenue keeps compounding at double-digit rates while content spending grows more slowly, and that the shares got cheap enough to bother with after roughly halving from their June 2025 high. Netflix separately said its 2026 US advertising commitments have nearly doubled, with the business tracking towards about US$3 billion of ad revenue. | Food for thoughtthese filings describe what a fund held at the end of June, not what it holds today. Six weeks is plenty of time to change your mind, and Ackman has form on this exact stock for doing it in three. The shares moved 5% anyway, which says more about how badly the market wanted a reason to buy Netflix than about anything in the document. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | TICKETING | | - | --------- | ## StubHub sold a record pile of World Cup tickets and made no money doing it Shares in the resale marketplace closed down 10.1% at US$7.68 on Thursday, having been off as much as 14% during the session, after results published the evening before. Revenue rose 33% to US$573.1 million and gross merchandise sales — the total value of tickets sold through the platform — rose 34% to US$3.1 billion, both records. Adjusted earnings came in at roughly nothing a share, against the US$0.24 analysts had modelled. **Where the money went.** The World Cup, held across North America this year, was the biggest event StubHub has ever handled, and handling it was expensive. Buyers came from more than 150 countries, and around one in seven World Cup tickets sold on the platform went to somebody outside the United States, all needing payment processing, fulfilment and support in their own time zone. Cost of revenue rose 39% and administrative costs came close to doubling. Adjusted EBITDA — earnings before the usual accounting deductions — still nearly doubled to US$105.7 million. Guidance is what unsettled people. The company lifted its full-year gross merchandise sales forecast to between US$10.1 billion and US$10.3 billion, but left the profit forecast exactly where it was, at US$400 million to US$420 million. More tickets, same money. The stock has traded between US$5.74 and US$27.89 since listing last September. | Next upthe second half has no World Cup in it. The question is how many of those first-time buyers from 150 countries come back for an ordinary Tuesday night fixture, because that is the only version of this quarter that repeats. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | - | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | 17.4 million barrelsthe rise in US commercial crude stocks in the week to 7 August, the largest weekly build in three and a half years, against forecasts for a 1.4 million barrel drawdown. There is a shooting war on and the tanks are filling up anyway. | ​ | 2.34%where businesses in the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's Q3 survey expect inflation to sit two years out, down from 2.53%. It is the number the Bank leans on hardest when arguing about whether it has done enough. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | US$10.25 billionApplied Materials' revenue guidance for the current quarter, issued after Thursday's close, about a billion dollars above the record it had just finished reporting. | ​ | US$142,000the full cost of Arizona State University's new content-creation degree, which takes its first students in October. More than half of Gen Z adults say they would like to be influencers, so the university is not short of customers. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 01 | **[ANZ now expects the worst Australian house price fall in 40 years](https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/08/house-prices-forecast-to-record-biggest-decline-in-at-least-40-years/?ref=sharespective.com)** — a peak-to-trough drop across the capitals deeper than anything since the 1980s, with Sydney and Melbourne worst hit, blamed on rates and the budget's capital gains changes. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[Kiwibank joins the rest in pushing fixed mortgage rates up](https://www.interest.co.nz/personal-finance/139739/kiwibank-follows-aussie-owned-rivals-increasing-some-key-fixed-home-loan?ref=sharespective.com)** — the Australian-owned banks moved first and Kiwibank has followed, without taking the market-leading spot on anything. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[Is a 6% KiwiSaver contribution too much for some people?](https://www.interest.co.nz/personal-finance/139056/nz-society-actuaries-group-suggests-6-kiwisaver-contributions-could-be?ref=sharespective.com)** — the NZ Society of Actuaries argues low earners can over-save, ending up better off in retirement than they ever were while working. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[The gadgets keeping people out of rest homes](https://thehustle.co/news/how-age-tech-is-keeping-grandma-out-of-a-nursing-home?ref=sharespective.com)** — an industry has grown up around monitoring elderly people at home, because the alternative runs to around US$10,000 a month. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[Gen Z is quietly abandoning social media](https://thehustle.co/news/gen-zs-not-so-social-media?ref=sharespective.com)** — the generation that grew up on it is using it differently, which is a problem for every business that assumed otherwise. | | ​ | | | 06 | **[Your next roll of toilet paper might come from a desert plant](https://www.kjzz.org/business/2026-08-05/new-yuma-facility-will-make-paper-products-from-this-native-desert-plant?ref=sharespective.com)** — Kimberly-Clark spent 20 years and US$250 million screening 70 fibres, from seaweed to chicken feathers, before settling on a succulent that grows on land nobody wants. | | ​ | | | 07 | **[Life on Earth may have started twice](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260811011134.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — genetic evidence suggests free-living cells emerged independently twice, which would make the whole thing much less of a fluke. | | ​ | | | 08 | **[Ordinary wi-fi can now identify you with near-perfect accuracy](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260811052857.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — no camera, no special hardware, just the way your body disturbs an unencrypted signal. Sleep well. | | ​ | | | 09 | **[An 11-year-old just became the world's youngest museum curator](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/an-11-year-old-boy-in-an-illinois-small-town-just-became-the-guinness-world-record-holder-for-being-the-youngest-museum-curator-180989313/?ref=sharespective.com)** — four years of collecting specimens in small-town Illinois, and a Guinness World Record to show for it. | | ​ | | | 10 | **[A schoolboy stole an abbot's kneecap 70 years ago](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-scallywag-schoolboy-swiped-an-abbots-kneecap-70-years-ago-his-widow-just-returned-it-to-glastonbury-abbey-180989308/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Glastonbury Abbey has it back, returned by the widow of the man who took it. | ### Wrapping up July retail sales land at 8.30​am New York time on Friday, half past midnight on Saturday here, with consensus looking for a 0.3% rise after 0.2% in June. The Federal Reserve then meets on 15 and 16 September, with the decision at 2​pm New York time on the 16th — 6​am on the 17th in New Zealand. Next week belongs to the American retailers: Home Depot on Tuesday, Target on Wednesday and Walmart on Thursday 20 August, where the line worth reading is comparable sales rather than headline profit, since it strips out new stores and shows whether people are buying more. Closer to home, Australia's June-quarter wage price index is due on 19 August, and New Zealand's July trade figures arrive on 20 August. The RBNZ's next Monetary Policy Statement is on 2 September and the RBA meets on 28 and 29 September. The New Zealand dollar slipped for a fourth day running, with USD/NZD at 1.7099, while the Australian dollar was close to unchanged at 1.4174\. The kiwi is being weighed down by softer local inflation expectations, which make another RBNZ rise harder to justify, while the Aussie is holding up because the RBA has left a rise explicitly on the table. Have a good Friday, and we'll see you tomorrow. ​ This newsletter is general information and commentary only. It is not financial advice, and it does not take account of your objectives, financial situation or needs. It reflects the author's own reading of public information at the time of writing and may be wrong. Do your own research and speak to a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decision.