Daily newsletter · Tue 1 Sep 2026
 | SharespectiveWall street, before your first coffee | Tue 1 Sep 2026 Issue 239 |
 The Hormuz Premium Plus: the FTC says Amazon spent seven years quietly marking up its own ad auctions. |
Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday. On Sunday, US forces hit two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz, after spotting preparations to lay mines in the waterway. It was the first exchange in about a month, and Iran answered with missiles and drones aimed at American bases in Jordan. Wall Street opened on Monday, looked at all of that, and sold off by a third of one percent.
The share market's shrug is not the interesting part. The bond market is. Ten-year Treasury yields pushed above 4.75% for the first time since January 2025, because dearer oil makes it harder for the Federal Reserve to do anything other than raise rates. August still finished as a winning month for all three indexes, which tells you how much of this year has been spent pricing wars that stay contained.
Market snapshot
| S&P 5007,686.14▼ 0.33% | | NASDAQ26,370.89▼ 0.12% | | NZX 5013,917.30▲ 1.08% |
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| ASX 2009,076.01▼ 0.18% | | USD/NZD1.6902▼ 0.04% | | USD/AUD1.3954▼ 0.01% |
US levels are the official 4pm New York close on Monday 31 August. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Monday's local closes, and currencies were taken at the end of Monday's New York session.
| ENERGY |
Oil went back through US$90 and the bond market minded more than the share market
Brent crude rose about 2.9% to just under US$91 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate gained 3.5% to US$86.34, after the weekend exchange between Washington and Tehran and a Monday threat from President Trump of further strikes. Energy shares did what energy shares do on days like this and finished up about 0.9%, with two-thirds of the sector higher. The Dow lost 374 points, or 0.7%.
Why the rates market cared more. Petrol is one of the fastest routes from a geopolitical headline into a consumer price index. With inflation already above target and Fed chair Kevin Warsh having spent Jackson Hole talking about prices rather than patience, a jump in crude gives a bond trader another reason to think the Fed's next move is up. Pricing for a 25 basis point rise at the September meeting, close to a coin flip a week ago, moved nearer 60% by Monday's close.
Worth keeping in proportion: nothing has stopped moving. Six to eight million barrels a day are still going through Hormuz, with no peace deal and no blockade. What the market is buying at US$90 is insurance against a disruption that hasn't happened, which is why it can fall as fast as it rose.
What to watch whether this stays a shipping-lane story or becomes an export story. Mines in the strait are worth a few dollars a barrel. Damage to loading terminals is a different number, and it would reach New Zealand and Australian pumps within about three weeks. |
| BIG TECH |
The FTC says Amazon spent seven years quietly marking up its own ad auctions
The Federal Trade Commission and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon on Monday, alleging that from 2018 the company secretly manipulated its search advertising auctions to lift the prices sellers paid. The complaint puts the take at more than US$20 billion from around 1.2 million advertisers, almost half of them small or medium businesses. Amazon shares fell more than 3%, erasing roughly US$86 billion of market value.
What a sponsored listing actually is. Search for running shoes on Amazon and the first few results are usually paid slots, sold by auction, with advertisers bidding per click. The FTC's case is not that the auction existed but that disclosures around its pricing and terms were inadequate while the mechanics were tilted in Amazon's favour. Amazon says the regulator misrepresented how the auctions work and picked its findings selectively, and that average cost-per-click has been flat adjusted for inflation.
The reason this one stings is where advertising now sits in Amazon's accounts. Ads brought in US$19.8 billion in the June quarter alone, up 26% on a year earlier, after US$68.6 billion across 2025 — third-largest digital ad platform in the world, behind Google and Meta. It also carries very little cost of goods, which is a polite way of saying it does a lot of the heavy lifting on profit.
The tell whether large advertisers start auditing their own Amazon spend rather than waiting on the court. Litigation like this takes years, and a few big brands quietly moving budgets would show up in a quarterly result long before a judge says anything. |
| RETAIL |
GameStop made more money from its eBay shares than from selling video games
The video game retailer put out preliminary second-quarter numbers on Monday and the shares rose about 3%. Net sales for the 13 weeks to 1 August are guided to between US$780 million and US$800 million, down from US$972.2 million a year earlier, while net income is guided to US$290 million to US$310 million, up from US$168.6 million. Selling less and earning more usually means something other than retailing is going on.
Where the profit came from. During the quarter GameStop converted a derivative position it held over eBay into an outright shareholding, booking roughly US$238 million of net gains, offset by about US$75 million of losses on digital assets and related receivables. As at 1 August it held 43.4 million eBay shares worth around US$4.95 billion. Operating income, which excludes all that, is still guided sharply higher at US$150 million to US$170 million against US$66.4 million. The sales decline is mundane by comparison: last year's quarter included the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, and since then there have been store closures and the sale of the French business.
The short version GameStop's headline profit is now partly a function of what eBay's share price did over thirteen weeks, which makes it a poor number to read on its own. The operating line underneath it looks genuinely better, and full results on 8 September will show whether that holds. |
Newsworthy numbers
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| US$3.5 billion Nvidia's convertible bond investment in Taiwan's MediaTek, announced Monday, which also brings MediaTek onto Nvidia's NVLink Fusion platform for custom AI chips. | | 9.43% PEXA Group's bounce on Monday to A$7.31, the best on the ASX 200, after Friday's 17% hiding over a weak volume outlook and a proposed cut to its regulated revenues. |
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| NZ$260.1 million taken out of KiwiSaver early during July, the bulk of it on financial hardship grounds. | | US$1 billion worth of Uncrustables sold by J.M. Smucker in its 2026 financial year. Household penetration is 27%, so the crustless sandwich has three-quarters of America still to go. |
Worth a read
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| 01 | Economists are unusually united on what the Reserve Bank does on Wednesday — Where every major bank economist has landed ahead of the OCR call, and why this much agreement is itself unusual. |
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| 02 | Housing is getting more affordable for first home buyers even as mortgage rates rise — Falling prices at the lower end are outrunning rising rates, which is not how most people assume affordability works. |
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| 03 | Priced out: Australians on what buying a home actually looks like now — Reader accounts and expert answers. Brisbane prices have more than doubled in six years. |
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| 04 | AI's unexpected winners — Three Japanese companies best known for high-end toilets, MSG and textiles make components the semiconductor industry cannot do without. All three are over a century old. |
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| 05 | The small businesses propping up the tandem bike industry — Less than 1% of bike sales, almost entirely small manufacturers, and a customer base of married couples who treat them as marriage counselling on wheels. |
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| 06 | The side hustle has entered its weird era — Renting out a backyard pool for US$22,000 a month, and hiring a professional bridesmaid from US$2,500. Three-quarters of those clients keep it secret. |
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| 07 | Scientists challenge a 70-year-old "lizard brain" myth — Georgia Tech and Cornell researchers argue two wiring systems compete for space rather than stacking in layers, which is why the armadillo and the squirrel monkey ended up with such different heads. |
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| 08 | Fossil feet may be misleading scientists about human evolution — Wild mangabeys in Ivory Coast climb about as well as chimps despite completely different feet, which undercuts a lot of inference drawn from fossil ankles. |
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| 09 | Speaking for the dead — A New York Times veteran on the craft of the obituary, and how a few hundred words decide what a life is remembered for. |
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| 10 | Ladies of the '80s — How Madonna, Grace Jones and their contemporaries rewired popular music, and what it did for the women who picked up instruments afterwards. |
Wrapping up
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand delivers its Monetary Policy Statement at 2pm on Wednesday 2 September NZT, which is noon in Sydney. Consensus is a 25 basis point rise to 2.75%, already priced, with ASB expecting the published track to signal at least one more increase by year-end and a peak near 3.3%. In the US, JOLTS and ISM manufacturing land tonight, ADP employment on Wednesday, jobless claims and ISM services on Thursday, and the August payrolls report on Friday 4 September — the one that matters most for whether the Fed hikes on 16 September.
Earnings are thin this week, with GameStop's full accounts on 8 September the next thing worth waiting for. Locally, the ABS publishes July building approvals at 11:30am AEST today, after June's seasonally adjusted total jumped 7.2% to 18,328 dwellings on the strength of apartments rather than houses. The RBA's next decision is not until 29 September, though rate rise talk has crept back into Australian pricing too.
The kiwi and the Aussie both finished Monday's New York session almost exactly where they started, with one US dollar buying 1.6902 New Zealand dollars and 1.3954 Australian dollars. Flat is a fair result on a day oil rose 3%, and it mostly reflects both currencies being held up by their own central banks edging towards higher rates rather than by anything in commodities.
That's your Tuesday. Go easy on the accelerator.
General information and commentary only. Nothing here is financial advice, and none of it accounts for your objectives, financial situation or needs. It reflects the author's own reading of publicly available 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.