> ## 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. # One Good Thursday - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-08-31/ - Published: 2026-08-30T22:00:51.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-30T22:00:51.000Z - Description: the Reserve Bank meets on Wednesday and nobody can agree on what it does. - 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 | Mon 31 Aug 2026Issue 238 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------ | | ![Today's edition](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/kicker-1.png)One Good ThursdayPlus: the Reserve Bank meets on Wednesday and nobody can agree on what it does. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | **Good morning, and welcome to a new week.** The S&P 500 finished last week 0.49% higher at 7,711.76 and the Nasdaq Composite 0.85% higher at 26,402.42, which reads like five days of steady progress. It was one day. The index drifted through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, added 55 points on Thursday when a batch of software results landed far better than anyone had allowed for, then gave a quarter of that back on Friday while Kevin Warsh used his Jackson Hole debut to talk about inflation. Net for the week: 37 points. Which leaves this week carrying the load. Friday brings the August jobs report, the last before the Fed meets on 15–16 September, and futures now put better-than-even odds on the next move being a rise rather than a cut. New Zealand gets there first: the Reserve Bank decides on Wednesday and the professionals are split three ways on what it does. Two of the three answers would count as a surprise, which is a generous definition of consensus. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,711.76▲ 0.49% | ​ | NASDAQ26,402.42▲ 0.85% | ​ | NZX 5013,768.18▼ 1.47% | | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2009,092.30▲ 0.37% | ​ | USD/NZD1.6929▲ 1.18% | ​ | USD/AUD1.3965▲ 0.11% | Levels are Friday's closes and changes are for the week to Friday 28 August. US levels are the official 4​pm New York close; the NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Friday's local closes, and currencies were taken at the end of Friday's New York session. | ​ | MARKETS | | - | ------- | ## The S&P 500 had a decent week and most of the shares in it did not Underneath that 0.49%, last week was one of the narrowest in months. Only about 43% of the index's members finished higher across the five sessions, and eight of its eleven sectors fell. Communication services and technology were the exceptions, up 1.4% and 1.3%; healthcare was the worst, down about 2%. Thursday's gain was bigger than the whole week's, so anyone who slept through that one session watched the index go backwards. **What a market-cap index actually measures.** The S&P 500 weights companies by size, so one very large company having a very good day counts for more than a hundred small ones having a mildly bad one. Salesforce rose about 22% over the week and ServiceNow about 13%, and between them that was enough to drag 500 companies into the green. The internals thinned out underneath: the share of index members trading above their 20-day average price fell from roughly half to 42%, and the share above their 50-day average slid to 54% from about 70% in mid-August. | What to watchbreadth like this resolves one of two ways — the leaders come back to the pack, or the pack catches up. Catching up needs a reason, and the likeliest one on the calendar is Friday's jobs report. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | PAYMENTS | | - | -------- | ## Visa sent Hims & Hers a US$75,000 bill and the shares lost a great deal more than that Bloomberg reported on 21 August that Visa had put Hims & Hers Health into its Acquirer Monitoring Program, after credit card disputes tied to the telehealth company's weight-loss subscriptions jumped in July. When markets opened on Monday the shares fell as much as 9.5%, closing down about 8% at US$31 — the stock's worst day in a month. The bill attached to all this is roughly US$75,000 in September. **How a card network ends up acting like a regulator.** When a customer rings their bank and says they did not authorise a charge, that is a chargeback, and Visa keeps score. Merchants whose disputes climb above 1.5% of transactions go on a watchlist, pay US$8 per disputed charge, and have to hold the rate under the threshold for three straight months to get off. No court, no hearing, no regulator — just a network that can make card payments expensive. For a business built on recurring monthly billing, that is one of the few genuinely binding constraints on how it sells. The money is trivial for a company this size, which is why the reaction was interesting. Weight-loss services made up about 75% of the disputes, suggesting a lot of people are ringing the bank rather than cancelling — a claim about how the product was sold, not whether it works. It also landed a month after the US Federal Trade Commission sued the company over allegedly sharing patient health information with advertisers, including Meta and Snap. | The tellthe fee is noise. The signal is the dispute rate over the next three months, which Visa has effectively forced into public view by making it expensive to ignore. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | CENTRAL BANKS | | - | ------------- | ## New Zealand's Reserve Bank decides on Wednesday and every argument in the room is a good one The Monetary Policy Statement lands at 2​pm Wednesday in Wellington, which is midday in Sydney. The Official Cash Rate sits at 2.50% after a quarter-point rise on 8 July, and Westpac expects another quarter-point to 2.75%. That is not a settled view: markets are pricing roughly even odds across a hold, a rise and a cut, which is about as split as a developed-market rate call gets. **Why this one is genuinely hard.** Annual inflation ran at 4.1% in the year to the June quarter, well above the bank's 1–3% band, and the biggest contributor by far was petrol, up 27.5%. Strip fuel out and the same basket rose 2.9%, comfortably inside the target. So the bank is looking at inflation driven largely by a war on the other side of the world and asking whether dearer borrowing in Hamilton does anything about it — against unemployment at 5.6% and an economy still running below capacity. The track it published in May implied an OCR near 3% by year end, so a rise would be it following its own map rather than changing course. | The open questionwhether a central bank should respond at all to inflation it did not create and cannot influence. Answer yes and you tighten into a soft jobs market. Answer no and you are betting households keep believing you while the pump sign climbs. Australia is a few weeks behind in the same argument. | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | - | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | US$4,455Where an ounce of gold finished the week, down about 3.4%. It had touched US$4,697 on Monday, before a hawkish Fed chair reminded everyone what the competition pays. | ​ | A$600AustralianSuper's new annual cap on asset-based admin fees from 31 October, up from A$350, with the fee going from 0.10% to 0.12%. Its first admin fee rise since 2022, and it touches about 3.6 million members. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | US$1.01 billionAnnual revenue a firm in one financial services category could earn and still count as a "small business" under a US Small Business Administration proposal, against a current ceiling of US$47 million. Some 114,500 companies would newly qualify. | ​ | 70 qubitsError-corrected logical qubits IBM and the University of Chicago ran together to finish, in about 15 minutes, a calculation no classical computer can practically reproduce. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | 01 | **[OCR preview: Economists split as RBNZ weighs knife-edge cash-rate call](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/ocr-preview-economists-split-as-rbnz-weighs-knife-edge-cash-rate-call/premium/QN33EFWGBZAKPGVNY4XQ7XIJU4/?ref=sharespective.com)** — The curtain-raiser on Wednesday, laying out who expects what and why. Better read before the announcement than after. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[Retirement savings to be 'decimated' under early access](https://www.portnews.com.au/story/9332362/retirement-savings-to-be-decimated-under-early-access/?ref=sharespective.com)** — The Australian fight over letting people pull super out early for cost-of-living relief, and the Treasurer's flat refusal. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[KiwiSaver or your house — which is likely to give better investment returns?](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/584466/kiwisaver-or-your-house-which-is-likely-to-give-better-investment-returns?ref=sharespective.com)** — The comparison every New Zealander makes badly, done properly with numbers. The answer for the last decade is not the one most people assume. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[Electronic Arts launches a platform to put more ads in its games](https://sherwood.news/business/electronic-arts-launches-a-platform-to-put-more-ads-in-its-games/?ref=sharespective.com)** — A publisher building the plumbing to sell placements inside gameplay, and betting players tolerate it. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[The IATA expects a US$98 billion jump in fuel costs to halve airline profits this year](https://sherwood.news/business/the-iata-expects-a-98-billion-jump-in-fuel-costs-to-halve-airline-profits-this-year/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Revenue up, profit halved, for an industry that cannot hedge its way out of a closed strait. | | ​ | | | 06 | **[Send your dog's poop to this startup — they won't be mad](https://thehustle.co/news/send-your-dogs-poop-to-this-startup-they-wont-be-mad?ref=sharespective.com)** — At-home PCR testing for pets at US$129 to US$299 a go. A lab that never has to meet the patient. | | ​ | | | 07 | **[Scientists discover a massive heat anomaly deep inside Mars](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260828082336.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — The planet's southern interior may be hundreds of degrees hotter than the north, and partly molten. Nobody expected Mars to be lopsided. | | ​ | | | 08 | **[Australia's red soil may be hiding a massive clean energy source](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260829035214.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — Western Australia's iron-rich rocks make hydrogen naturally, and researchers think the reaction can be pushed much harder. | | ​ | | | 09 | **[The seniors against senior housing](https://longreads.com/2026/08/27/seniors-affordability-housing-oakland/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Older Americans in Oakland organising against affordable housing built for older Americans. Why supply is hard everywhere, here included. | | ​ | | | 10 | **[The yarddogs of Northwest Arkansas](https://longreads.com/2026/08/26/bentonville-arkansas-dogs-cyclists/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Bentonville spent a fortune turning itself into a cycling destination. The dogs have opinions. | ### Wrapping up Last week was four flat sessions, one very good Thursday and a hawkish Friday, and it left the market pricing a rise rather than a cut as the Fed's next move. This week fills in the blanks. The RBNZ and the Bank of Canada both decide on Wednesday; US ISM manufacturing and July JOLTS land Tuesday, ADP payrolls Wednesday, and ISM services Thursday with consensus at 54.5\. Friday brings August non-farm payrolls, economists clustered around 55,000 after July's 23,000 decline — the last labour read before the 15–16 September FOMC. The earnings diary is short and pointed. Dell and Palo Alto Networks report after Tuesday's close — read Dell for server margins rather than revenue, because selling AI hardware thinly is the whole debate. Broadcom, Snowflake and Hewlett Packard Enterprise follow after Wednesday's close, with Broadcom's custom-chip orders the line most likely to move the sector, and Lululemon lands before Thursday's open, where Americas comparable sales is the number. Closer to home, Australian second-quarter GDP and New Zealand's terms of trade both arrive Wednesday, Australia's July trade balance Thursday, and China's official PMIs today. The kiwi had the more eventful week, sliding 1.18% against the US dollar to 1.6929 while the Aussie barely moved at 1.3965, lifting the Australian dollar to about NZ$1.21\. Both met the same stronger greenback after Warsh spoke, but Australia's inflation surprise gave the Aussie its own reason to hold while the kiwi went into Wednesday with nobody sure which way the Reserve Bank jumps. Have a good week, and we'll see you tomorrow. ​ General information and commentary only, and not financial advice. 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 talk to a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decision.