> ## 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. # The Rout Goes Global - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-09-02/ - Published: 2026-09-01T22:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-01T21:59:59.000Z - Description: Dell booked sixty billion dollars of AI server orders in thirteen weeks. - 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 | Wed 2 Sep 2026Issue 240 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------- | | ![Today's edition](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/kicker-1.png)The Rout Goes GlobalPlus: Dell booked sixty billion dollars of AI server orders in thirteen weeks. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | **Good morning. It's Wednesday, and the bond market is doing all the talking.** Japan's 10-year government bond yield touched 3% on Tuesday for the first time since 1996, long enough ago that most of the people trading it have never seen it there. American 10-year Treasuries reached 4.79%, the highest since January 2025\. Share markets, asked to compete with that, went down politely: the S&P 500 lost 0.71% and the Nasdaq Composite 1.03%. The local session was worse. The ASX 200 dropped 1.81% and the NZX 50 gave up 0.94%, both reacting to the same thing — which is the slightly awkward truth of the past few days. None of this started here, and none of it will be fixed here either. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,631.47▼ 0.71% | ​ | NASDAQ26,099.77▼ 1.03% | ​ | NZX 5013,786.90▼ 0.94% | | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2008,912.01▼ 1.81% | ​ | USD/NZD1.6975▲ 0.44% | ​ | USD/AUD1.3997▲ 0.31% | US levels are the official 4​pm New York close on Tuesday 1 September. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Tuesday's local closes, and currencies were taken at the end of Tuesday's New York session. | ​ | BONDS | | - | ----- | ## Japan's 10-year yield hit 3% for the first time in thirty years and pulled everyone else along Tuesday was a bad day to own a government bond almost anywhere. Japan's 10-year yield reached the 3% mark it last saw in 1996, and the five-year hit a record 2.26%. In London, 10-year gilts jumped as much as 11 basis points to 5.25% and the 30-year went to 5.89%. The US 30-year sat at 5.27%, near multi-decade highs. Australia's 10-year rose six basis points to 5.16% — comfortably above the American equivalent. **Why it is happening everywhere at once.** A yield rising means the bond's price is falling, and three things are pushing prices down together. Oil is the loudest: crude jumped again after strikes in the Strait of Hormuz, and dearer petrol feeds straight into inflation, which makes central banks more likely to raise rates than cut them. Then there is supply. American government debt has just passed US$40 trillion, and the big cloud companies have sold roughly US$220 billion of bonds this year to pay for AI datacentres. Every new bond has to find a buyer, and buyers only turn up at a price. The trans-Tasman version is not academic. Australia and New Zealand borrow into the same pool, and fixed mortgage rates in both follow the swap curve rather than the cash rate — which is why home loan pricing keeps creeping up in a year when both central banks were meant to be finished. | What to watchwhether long yields keep climbing after the central banks have spoken. A short end that rises because a hike is coming is normal. A 30-year rising alongside it is the market demanding more compensation to lend for three decades, and that is a harder problem to talk down. | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | TECHNOLOGY | | - | ---------- | ## Dell took US$60.9 billion of AI server orders in a single quarter and the shares jumped 10% after the bell Dell reported its fiscal second quarter after Tuesday's close and the numbers were not close. Revenue came in at US$46.97 billion, up about 58% on a year earlier, against roughly US$44.9 billion expected, and adjusted earnings were US$7.04 a share where Wall Street had pencilled in US$4.92\. Shares rose about 10% in extended trading, the cheeriest thing to happen all session. **What a backlog is, and why this one is odd.** A backlog is work customers have committed to that has not been delivered or billed yet. Dell recognised a record US$16.4 billion of AI server revenue in the quarter, took US$60.9 billion of new orders, and still finished with US$95 billion of backlog — up from US$51.3 billion three months earlier. It shipped a record amount and the queue behind it nearly doubled anyway. Guidance moved accordingly: US$49.0 billion of revenue and US$6.50 a share for the current quarter, against analyst estimates near US$41.4 billion and US$4.49. Dell now expects US$74 billion of AI-optimised server sales this financial year, about triple last year's. Six months ago it was forecasting roughly double. | The catchnone of this is high-margin work. Assembling racks of somebody else's accelerators earns thin margins, and the more the AI line grows as a share of the whole, the harder it pulls the group down. Dell is solving that by selling so much of it that the profit dollars grow anyway, which works until orders stop compounding. The number to find in the next result is not the backlog but the operating margin beside it. | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | CONSUMER | | - | -------- | ## Nike keeps setting new lows and the problem has outgrown China Nike slipped to another multi-year low on Tuesday, trading below US$39 and back at levels last seen in 2014\. The stock is down roughly 38% in 2026, on track for its worst calendar year since 1993, and sits about 78% beneath its November 2021 record close of US$177.51\. Around US$200 billion of market value has gone since then. **Where the sales actually went.** Greater China has now recorded eight consecutive quarters of falling revenue, down 12% as reported in the fourth quarter and 17% currency-neutral. The rest of the business is not carrying it either: full-year revenue was flat, digital sales fell 12% in the quarter and Nike Direct dropped 9% currency-neutral, with wholesale up just 1%. On and Hoka have spent three years quietly taking the premium running customer, and tariffs are due to take close to three percentage points off gross margin. Then there is the distribution reset. Nike and its two biggest Chinese wholesale partners, Topsports and Pou Sheng, have confirmed that partner-run online storefronts stop selling Nike product from January 2027, leaving its Chinese web presence to its own app and official stores on Tmall, JD.com and Douyin. Bernstein puts the channel being wound to zero at about US$1 billion of revenue. | The open questionwhether chief executive Elliott Hill is fixing a distribution problem or a brand problem, because they take different amounts of time. Cleaning up channels and inventory is measurable, and roughly two years of work. Getting a nineteen-year-old in Shanghai to want the shoes again is neither. | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | - | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 54.6the ISM manufacturing index for August, down from 55.6 in July but still an eighth straight month of American factories expanding. | ​ | US$9.10bnPalo Alto Networks' next-generation security annual recurring revenue, up 63%, reported with fourth-quarter results after Tuesday's close. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | 7.0%annual growth in Australian household spending in the year to July, up from 6.1%, which is not the number of a country whose central bank has finished raising rates. | ​ | US$4,360the spot gold price, a two-week low after a 2% fall. Tanker strikes, a bond rout and an oil spike, and the world's designated panic asset had one of its worst days of the month. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 01 | **[The average KiwiSaver balance for your age](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/alert-top/596311/the-average-kiwisaver-balance-for-your-age?ref=sharespective.com)** — RNZ breaks it down by decade. The average is $41,286, but a third of members have under $10,000, which is the figure that matters. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[Rate pressure builds](https://www.interest.co.nz/personal-finance/139389/following-rbnzs-rate-hike-and-bank-pass-throughs-floating-rates-attention?ref=sharespective.com)** — where fixed mortgage rates go after today's decision, and why swap rates rather than the OCR are what to watch if you are refixing. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[Australians aren't getting the RBA's message](https://www.marketindex.com.au/news/rate-hikes-are-coming-as-australians-just-arent-getting-the-rbas-message?ref=sharespective.com)** — households keep spending as though the tightening cycle ended, which is precisely the behaviour that keeps it going. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[The Japanese AI winners that make toilets, glass fibre and seasoning](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/japanese-ai-winners-toilets-fiberglass-and-seasoning.html?ref=sharespective.com)** — three companies over a century old, all now essential to chipmaking. The MSG company's packaging film is in nearly every high-performance semiconductor on earth. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[The startup turning whisky waste into fish food](https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/03/this-scottish-startup-saves-wild-fish-by-replacing-them-with-omega-3-algae-fed-on-whisky-w?ref=sharespective.com)** — MiAlgae feeds distillery byproduct to algae and sells the omega-3, which beats catching wild fish to feed farmed fish. | | ​ | | | 06 | **[The national debt hit US$40 trillion. How much is that?](https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/23/economy/national-debt-40-trillion?ref=sharespective.com)** — a useful attempt to make an unimaginable number imaginable, and relevant to why long bonds sold off this week. | | ​ | | | 07 | **[Australia's red soil may be hiding a clean energy source](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260829035214.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — Edith Cowan University researchers found Pilbara magnetite generates hydrogen when it meets hot water, and worked out how to speed it up. | | ​ | | | 08 | **[Experimental eye drops help blind mice see again](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260828005224.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — light-activated molecules standing in for dead photoreceptors, with no gene therapy and no implant. | | ​ | | | 09 | **['Proof by Underpants' is a real soil science method](https://www.popsci.com/environment/bury-underwear-soil-health/?ref=sharespective.com)** — a thousand Swiss volunteers buried cotton undies and dug them up two months later. Garden soil ate 58% of them; lawns barely touched theirs. | | ​ | | | 10 | **[An 11,000-year-old statue of a man riding a leopard](https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/08/28/neolithic-sculpture-of-human-riding-a-leopard-discovered-in-turkey?ref=sharespective.com)** — found on a stone bench at Karahan Tepe in Türkiye, and stylistically unlike anything dug up before. | ### Wrapping up The Reserve Bank of New Zealand delivers today at 2​pm NZT, and all five major bank economics teams expect a 25 basis point rise taking the OCR to 2.75%; the next decision is 28 October. Friday brings the American August jobs report, consensus about 58,000 new jobs and unemployment at 4.1% — a hot print would harden the case for a Fed hike on 15–16 September. The Bank of Canada also decides this week. Broadcom reports Wednesday US time, Thursday morning here, and the line to find is semiconductor revenue: analysts have it roughly doubling to around US$18.5 billion, with the options market pricing a move of about 7.6% either way. Australia's June-quarter GDP lands at 11.30​am AEST today, forecasts clustered between 0.2% and 0.4%, and the RBA meets 28–29 September with markets now putting a hike at a little better than even money, up from about one in ten a week ago. The kiwi slipped 0.44% to a two-week low and the Australian dollar fell 0.31%, leaving USD/NZD at 1.6975 and USD/AUD at 1.3997\. Both were caught between a firm greenback, as yields climbed and traders leaned into a September Fed hike, and their own tightening central banks — which is the only reason the falls were so small. Enjoy your Wednesday, and spare a thought for anyone refixing a mortgage. ​ 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.