> ## 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 Beat Nobody Wanted - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-09-05/ - Published: 2026-09-04T22:17:48.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-04T22:17:48.000Z - Description: Lululemon cut its outlook for the third time this year and lost nearly a fifth of its value in a session. - 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 morning tea | Daily newsletterSat 5 Sep 2026 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------ | | ![Today's edition](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/kicker-1.png)The Beat Nobody WantedPlus: Lululemon cut its outlook for the third time this year and lost nearly a fifth of its value in a session. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | **Good morning, and welcome to Saturday.** American employers added 162,000 jobs in August. Economists had picked about 55,000\. That is the sort of number that normally has the market in a good mood, and instead the S&P 500 finished down 0.38%, the Nasdaq Composite down 0.29% and the Dow down 0.51%. Strong hiring makes a September rate rise more likely, and traders would currently prefer the pause to the payrolls. It was a mild sort of decline rather than a rush for the exit — 21 of the 30 Dow stocks drifted lower, and the small-cap Russell 2000 actually finished up 0.21%. Monday is Labor Day in the United States, so nobody has to think about any of it until Tuesday. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,718.36▼ 0.38% | ​ | NASDAQ26,506.99▼ 0.29% | ​ | NZX 5013,974.18▲ 0.92% | | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2009,005.00▼ 0.16% | ​ | USD/NZD1.6997▼ 0.06% | ​ | USD/AUD1.3876▼ 0.08% | US levels are the official 4​pm New York close on Friday 4 September. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Friday's local closes, and currencies were taken at the end of Friday's New York session. | ​ | ECONOMY | | - | ------- | ## American employers added 162,000 jobs in August and the share market treated it as bad news The August payrolls report beat every forecast in Bloomberg's survey of economists. Unemployment held at 4.1%. The revisions were arguably the bigger surprise: June was lifted by 11,000 and July by 44,000, which turns July from a reported loss of 23,000 jobs into a gain of 21,000\. A month that looked like the labour market cracking now looks like an ordinary month that was mismeasured. **Where the jobs actually came from.** Restaurants and bars did most of the work, adding 59,000 positions against a typical month of about 12,000\. Local government education put on 42,000 and manufacturing 16,000\. The information sector went the other way and shed 23,000, with the losses concentrated in computing infrastructure, publishing and broadcasting. Labour force participation nudged up to 61.6%, though it is still half a percentage point below where it started the year. That mix matters because the Federal Reserve is not debating when to cut. It has held the funds rate at 3.50% to 3.75% since July, and the live argument on the committee is whether to raise. Money markets moved from about a 54% chance of a September hike to roughly 61% within the day. The 10-year Treasury yield spiked to 4.81% on the release before settling back to about 4.77%, and the dollar index added 0.13% to 99.13 before giving up part of the move ahead of the long weekend. | Next upAugust consumer prices, out 8.30​am on Friday 11 September in New York — 12.30​am Saturday here and 10.30​pm Friday in Sydney. Governor Christopher Waller has already said publicly that continued disinflation would make him comfortable holding rates in September. The jobs number did not give him what he asked for, so the inflation print is now carrying the whole argument. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | RETAIL | | - | ------ | ## Lululemon cut its outlook for the third time this year and the shares fell 18% Second-quarter revenue fell 4% to US$2.42 billion, missing the US$2.46 billion analysts expected, and comparable sales across the group dropped about 10%. The shares closed at US$100.13, down 17.77%, having been off as much as 20% before the opening bell. The company now expects full-year revenue of US$10.35 billion to US$10.5 billion — a decline of 5% to 7% on last year — and adjusted earnings of US$9.48 to US$9.73 a share. **The earnings beat that wasn't.** Lululemon came in ahead of forecasts on earnings per share, which in a normal quarter would have cushioned the revenue miss. Roughly US$0.86 a share of that came from tariff refunds and the interest earned on them. Strip out the money customs gave back and the quarter looks considerably worse than the headline, which is presumably why nobody treated the beat as one. The problem the company keeps describing is North America, where store traffic and demand both softened. This is the third time in 2026 that management has walked its own forecast down. For a business built on people paying a premium for the leggings, a 10% fall in comparable sales is the number that undermines the story. | The tellwatch North American comparable sales rather than the guidance range. Guidance can be reset until it is finally beatable, and Lululemon has now demonstrated it will do that three times in nine months. Same-store demand in the home market is the only line that shows whether shoppers are coming back. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | AUTOS | | - | ----- | ## Tesla launched a taxi with no steering wheel and collected a federal safety inquiry Tesla shares fell 6% on Friday after the Cybercab, its purpose-built driverless taxi, landed with a thud. The Austin event on Thursday was invite-only, was not streamed, and Elon Musk did not appear. The vehicle is the one Tesla has been promising for two years: no steering wheel, no pedals, and complete dependence on the company's Full Self-Driving software. Analysts at Wells Fargo noted afterwards that the update contained little that was new, which for a Tesla event is its own kind of verdict. **What the regulator wants to know.** The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an Audit Query on Friday covering roughly 1,000 Cybercabs. The question is about process, not crashes. Tesla self-certified that a vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals meets every federal motor vehicle safety standard, and the regulator wants the technical data behind that call. Self-certification is normal in the American system; a car with no manual controls at all is not. The awkward part is the timing. Tesla needed the Cybercab to move the conversation off vehicle sales and onto autonomy, which is where its valuation has been living for a while. Instead it got a muted launch and a federal file opened in the same 24 hours. | The open questionwhether an Audit Query stays an audit. It is the mildest tool the regulator has and often ends quietly, but it is also how bigger investigations start. If NHTSA decides the self-certification does not hold up, the constraint on Tesla's robotaxi plans stops being software and starts being paperwork. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | - | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | US$37.75average hourly pay for American private sector workers in August, up 10 cents on the month and 3.1% over the year. | ​ | A$4.4 trillionthe size of Australia's superannuation pool as at March. About half of it is now invested offshore, up from roughly a third a decade ago. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | NZ$9.25Fonterra's forecast midpoint for the 2026/27 farmgate milk price per kilo of milk solids, cut 50 cents in July after global dairy auction prices slid 11%. | ​ | 14 millioninsect species researchers now think are crawling around on Earth, against roughly a million that have actually been described. The other 13 million have not been told. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 01 | **[6% KiwiSaver contributions 'could be excessive' for minimum wage earners](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 that pushing default contributions to 6% would leave some low earners with more spending money in retirement than they had while working. It prefers 5% from each side. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[Interest rates on hold but RBA governor keeps door open to hikes](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/rba-interest-rates-august-2026/107023850?ref=sharespective.com)** — Michele Bullock said the board only considered hiking or holding, with cutting never on the table. Useful background now that NAB, Deutsche Bank and UBS all expect a rise on 29 September. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[JM Smucker says it sold $1 billion worth of Uncrustables in FY2026](https://sherwood.news/business/jm-smucker-says-it-sold-1-billion-worth-of-uncrustables-in-fy2026/?ref=sharespective.com)** — A frozen, crustless peanut butter sandwich is now a billion-dollar brand with a 900,000 square foot factory built solely to make it. Three million new households bought in over the past year. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[We've had fire for longer than we thought](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/hominids-had-fire-longer-than-thought?ref=sharespective.com)** — Burnt owl pellets in a South African cave push evidence of hominid fire use back to about 1.8 million years ago, some 800,000 years earlier than thought. Homo erectus probably could not light a fire, only carry one home from a wildfire. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[Speaking for the Dead](https://longreads.com/2026/08/11/obituaries-new-york-times-sam-roberts/?ref=sharespective.com)** — A New York Times veteran on the craft of the obituary, including the 1987 front-page piece on playwright Charles Ludlam, the first in the paper to name AIDS as a cause of death. The family confirmed it fifteen minutes before deadline. | ### Wrapping up The Federal Reserve meets on 15 and 16 September, with the decision and the updated dot plot at 2​pm New York time on the Wednesday — 6​am Thursday in Auckland and 4​am in Sydney. Markets finished the week pricing roughly a 61% chance of a 25 basis point rise, which would be the first move up under chair Kevin Warsh. Before that, August consumer prices land on Friday 11 September and are now the single number the decision hangs on. Oracle reports first-quarter results on Thursday 10 September after the close, and the line to watch is remaining performance obligations — the contracted work it has not yet delivered, which finished last financial year at US$638 billion after a 363% jump. Adobe reports the same afternoon, where the question is whether AI features are converting into subscription revenue. Closer to home, the ABS publishes its multiple job-holders release on Friday 11 September, New Zealand's June quarter GDP is out on 17 September, and the RBA decides on 29 September. The kiwi finished the week at 1.6997 to the US dollar and the Aussie at 1.3876, both a touch stronger despite a firmer greenback everywhere else. Both currencies are being held up by their own central banks — markets put the odds of an RBA hike this month at 58%, and the RBNZ has already moved, lifting the official cash rate to 2.75% on 2 September. Enjoy the long weekend — the Americans certainly will. ​ 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 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.