> ## 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. # Beat, Shrug, Repeat - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-08-27/ - Published: 2026-08-26T22:00:29.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-26T22:00:28.000Z - Description: the tariff refunds quietly propping up American retail earnings. - 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 | Thu 27 Aug 2026Issue 236 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------ | | ![Today's edition](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/kicker-1.png)Beat, Shrug, RepeatPlus: the tariff refunds quietly propping up American retail earnings. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | **Good morning, and welcome to Thursday.** Nvidia sold US$96.2 billion of chips in three months, more than double the same quarter a year ago, said this quarter would be bigger again, and watched its shares slip about 1.5% after hours. The regular session had already been a non-event: the S&P 500 finished 0.02% lower, the Nasdaq 0.08% and the Dow 0.21%, after July's inflation figures came in a shade warm. Under all that stillness, the argument has changed shape. Inflation is stuck at a level that had three Fed officials voting to *raise* rates last month, and Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole keynote as chair on Friday. A market that spent the day waiting on a chip company may have been facing the wrong way. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,675.70▼ 0.02% | ​ | NASDAQ26,130.20▼ 0.08% | ​ | NZX 5014,013.21▲ 0.15% | | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2009,127.80▼ 0.40% | ​ | USD/NZD1.6824▲ 0.56% | ​ | USD/AUD1.3941▼ 0.14% | US levels are the official 4​pm New York close on Wednesday 26 August. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Wednesday's local closes, and currencies were taken late in Wednesday's New York session. | ​ | BIG TECH | | - | -------- | ## Nvidia doubled its revenue, raised the bar again, and the shares went backwards anyway Revenue for the July quarter was US$96.2 billion against about US$92.2 billion expected, up 106% on a year ago. The data centre division did US$89.0 billion of that, up 117%, split between US$48.7 billion from the big cloud operators and US$40.3 billion from everyone else building AI. Adjusted earnings came in at US$2.22 a share against roughly US$2.07 expected, and gross margin — the share of each sales dollar left after making the thing — rose to 75.0%. **The guide is the whole story.** Nvidia told investors to expect US$108 billion this quarter, give or take 2%, where analysts had pencilled in about US$105 billion. The detail worth sitting with is that the number assumes nothing at all from China: last quarter, older Hopper chips shipped there came to under 1% of data centre revenue, so management has stopped counting on the world's second-largest economy altogether. None of which was enough. The stock had fallen for seven straight sessions into the print, closed Wednesday down 1.59%, then gave up another 1.5% after hours as investors noted gross margin is guided down to 74% on rising memory costs. Jensen Huang's framing was that "compute is revenue" — that the chips are now doing paid work rather than being stockpiled for a future that hasn't arrived. | Our takethe question has moved on from whether Nvidia can sell the chips to whether the people buying them can make the sums work. A company can only guide 89% revenue growth so many times before the interesting risk sits with its customers rather than with it. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | TRADE | | - | ----- | ## A Supreme Court ruling is quietly paying for American retailers' earnings beats Abercrombie & Fitch closed 35.7% higher on Wednesday after reporting earnings of US$4.17 a share for the quarter to 1 August, against its own guidance of US$1.80 to US$2.00\. Net sales rose 5% to US$1.27 billion, and the company lifted full-year guidance to US$13.10–13.60 a share from US$10.20–11.00\. Roughly US$1.75 a share of that quarter came from a single US$100 million cheque from the US government. **Where the money is coming from.** On 20 February the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the president has no power to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, making every levy collected under it invalid. About US$166 billion had been taken from roughly 330,000 importers, and around US$100 billion had gone back out the door by the end of July. Walmart has booked US$2.9 billion, Home Depot about US$720 million, Lowe's US$80 million. Walmart is putting its refund into price cuts, which is sensible competitively and does nothing for margins. Abercrombie kept it: strip the refund out and earnings were about US$2.42 a share, with an operating margin near 12% rather than the 20% on the page. Meanwhile shoppers who paid the tariffs through higher prices have started filing class actions arguing the refunds are not the retailers' to keep. | A word of cautionthese are one-off payments landing in quarterly numbers, and next year's comparisons will not have them. Anyone reading this reporting season as proof the American consumer has come roaring back is reading a government cheque. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | ECONOMY | | - | ------- | ## American inflation will not come down, and the Fed's next argument is about raising rates July's PCE index — the inflation measure the Fed actually targets — rose 0.2% on the month and 3.7% on the year, a tenth above forecast and unchanged from June. Core PCE, which strips out food and fuel, matched expectations at 0.2% and 3.3%, also unchanged. Two months of no progress at all. The 10-year Treasury yield edged up about two basis points to around 4.66%, and the 30-year to 5.18%. **Why the debate is about hiking.** The federal funds rate sits at 3.50–3.75%, and at the July meeting the committee voted 9–3 to leave it there. All three dissenters — Lorie Logan in Dallas, Neel Kashkari in Minneapolis and Beth Hammack in Cleveland — wanted a quarter-point rise. That is the most early dissent a new Fed chair has faced since 1970, and Warsh has responded by stripping forward guidance out of the statement, which leaves markets reading tea leaves rather than sentences. So Friday matters more than usual. Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole keynote as chair at 10​am New York time — 2​am Saturday in Auckland, midnight Friday in Sydney — at a symposium nominally about financial innovation and payments. Nobody is going for the payments. Odds on the 16 September decision are close to a coin toss between holding and hiking, and he is the one person who could move them. | Next upWarsh has spent his short tenure saying as little as possible, so the base case is that Friday clarifies nothing. Watch the long end of the bond market instead — if 30-year yields keep climbing while he stays quiet, the market is answering for him. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | - | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | US$16.7bnWhat Meta agreed on Wednesday to pay state attorneys-general, over ten years, to settle claims its apps were built to hook teenagers. It also has to mute notifications during school hours. | ​ | A$1.6bnWoolworths' full-year net profit, up 15.4%, with the dividend lifted 15.5% to 97 cents. The shares rose about 4% and the ASX 200 fell anyway. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | 95%Ajinomoto's share of the insulating film wrapped around microprocessors, a material it found as a byproduct of making MSG. | ​ | US$3.35mPaid at auction for the ball Diego Maradona punched into the net in 1986\. The estimate was US$10 million, so the Hand of God has been marked down by two-thirds. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 01 | **[ASIC warns of 'first significant cracks' in Australian private credit](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-27/asic-warns-first-significant-cracks-in-australian-private-credit/107081904?ref=sharespective.com)** — Two big funds have limited withdrawals and a Sydney homebuilder has collapsed owing A$3.2 billion. It matters because most Australian adults own some private credit through their super. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[Retail sales fall for the first time in nearly two years as fuel swallows the difference](https://newswire.co.nz/2026/08/retail-sales-fall-june-2026-quarter-fuel/?ref=sharespective.com)** — New Zealand retail volumes dropped 0.5% in the June quarter, ending six quarters of growth. Fuel volumes fell 13% while the fuel bill rose 12%, which tells you where the money went. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[How new superannuation changes will impact you](https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/superannuation-changes-2026/f452czcxg?ref=sharespective.com)** — From 1 July, earnings on Australian super balances above A$3 million are taxed at 30% and above A$10 million at 40% — and far fewer people are caught than the noise suggests. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[The LEGO Group stacks up another record first half](https://toybook.com/lego-group-2026-first-half-earnings/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Revenue up 21%, net profit up 32%, 330 new products in six months. A plastic brick invented in 1958 continues to beat most of the technology sector. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[AI's unexpected winners](https://thehustle.co/newsletters/19-08-2026?ref=sharespective.com)** — The chip boom is being quietly enjoyed by a Japanese toilet maker, an MSG producer and a century-old textile mill, all of which make something semiconductors cannot do without. | | ​ | | | 06 | **[Labs in the lab](https://thehustle.co/newsletters/26-08-2026?ref=sharespective.com)** — An Indian startup trains labradors and beagles to sniff early-stage cancer out of breath samples, with AI reading the dogs. Also: NASA-funded cookies 3D-printed from upcycled plastic, untasted. | | ​ | | | 07 | **[Denisovans were surprisingly tall, new fossils from Taiwan suggest](https://www.sci.news/othersciences/anthropology/tall-denisovans-14999.html?ref=sharespective.com)** — Two leg bones from the Penghu Channel put one individual at about 190cm and 91kg, upending the assumption that tropical populations ran small. | | ​ | | | 08 | **[3,500-year-old skeletons challenge what scientists thought they knew about syphilis](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260811011143.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — Children's remains from prehistoric Vietnam show mother-to-child transmission of a treponemal disease, muddying a century of assumptions about syphilis's origins. | | ​ | | | 09 | **['Hunger stones' resurface in Europe as rivers hit historic lows](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hunger-stones-resurface-europe-bringing-centuries-old-warnings-back-into-view-rivers-hit-historic-lows-180989387/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Drought markers carved into riverbeds between the 15th and 20th centuries are visible again along the Elbe and the Rhine. One of them reads: "If you see me, weep." | | ​ | | | 10 | **[Cast your vote for the chunkiest alpine rodent during Colorado's first-ever Fat Marmot Week](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cast-your-vote-for-the-chunkiest-alpine-rodent-during-colorados-first-ever-fat-marmot-week-180989395/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Eight yellow-bellied marmots, one bracket, and a research programme running since 1962 that now part-funds itself through marmot videos on OnlyFans. | ### Wrapping up The Reserve Bank of New Zealand delivers a full Monetary Policy Statement next Wednesday, 2 September, at 2​pm. The OCR is 2.50% after July's quarter-point rise, which passed only on Governor Anna Breman's casting vote in a 3–3 committee, and markets are split between a hold, a hike and a cut. The RBA is next up on 29 September with the cash rate at 4.35%, and Wednesday's July CPI — 3.5% annually, down from 3.8%, but with the monthly trimmed mean at 0.5% against 0.3% expected — pushed September hike pricing to about 27% from 17%. Marvell reports after Thursday's New York close, around 8​am Friday our time, and the line to watch is data centre revenue — the first read on whether Nvidia's optimism runs down the supply chain. Lululemon, Best Buy, Dollar General, Autodesk and Workday also report Thursday. Australia's June-quarter private capital expenditure lands Thursday from the ABS, and New Zealand's diary is quiet until ANZ's business outlook survey on Monday. The kiwi eased to about 59.44 US cents, or 1.6824 on the USD/NZD quote, while the Australian dollar edged up to 71.73 cents, or 1.3941 on USD/AUD. The split came straight out of Wednesday's inflation prints: Australia's was hot enough to firm rate-hike pricing, while New Zealand had nothing local to put against a US dollar bid up by sticky PCE. Enjoy your Thursday, and we'll see you in the morning. ​ General information and commentary only. This is not financial advice and 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 investing.