Daily newsletter · Tue 8 Sep 2026
 | SharespectiveWall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletterTue 8 Sep 2026 |
 The Session That Wasn't Plus: Tesla launched its robotaxi, and the stock lost 6% the next day. |
Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday. Wall Street took Labor Day off — the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the bond market all shut, with even the futures pits knocking off at lunchtime. So the last session that traded was Friday's, and it was a grumpy one. American employers added 162,000 jobs in August against the 53,000 economists had pencilled in, the unemployment rate sat still at 4.1%, and a market that wants a friendly Federal Reserve decided a strong labour market was bad news. The S&P 500 gave back 0.38%.
Everybody else worked through it. Oil kept climbing on weekend strikes near the Strait of Hormuz, the yen had its best day since February after another of Prime Minister Takaichi's advisers talked up a rate rise, and Germany's DAX slipped 0.4%. New York opens tonight with three days of news to price at once.
Market snapshot
| S&P 5007,718.60▼ 0.38% | | NASDAQ26,506.99▼ 0.29% | | NZX 5013,942▼ 0.23% |
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| ASX 2009,010.90▲ 0.06% | | USD/NZD1.7018▲ 0.08% | | USD/AUD1.3850▼ 0.24% |
US markets were closed on Monday for Labor Day, so the S&P 500 and NASDAQ figures are Friday 4 September's official 4pm New York close and Friday's session change. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Monday's local closes; currencies were taken late in Monday's shortened offshore session.
| SHIPPING |
The closed Strait of Hormuz has turned tanker owners into the best-performing corner of the market
Friday was a red day almost everywhere, with one loud exception. A cluster of tanker and dry-bulk owners — DHT Holdings, Frontline, Nordic American Tankers, Genco Shipping, Teekay Tankers and several smaller names — all touched 52-week highs while the index around them fell. Teekay got to US$91.56. Nordic American, a US$7 stock, is up about 121% over a year.
Why a blocked waterway pays shipowners. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil normally passes through Hormuz, and Iran's Supreme National Security Council has said the strait stays shut until Washington changes its behaviour. Frontline reckons crude exports from inside the strait have fallen 82%, and that each of its supertankers is now spending 23% more days idle waiting on delays. The barrels that still move take longer routes, so the same volume of oil ties up far more ships for far longer. A tanker owner is really renting out distance and time. Spot rates for the biggest ships on the Middle East-to-Asia run approached US$500,000 a day at the peak of the disruption, against an average of about US$152,700 across the June quarter.
The money is showing up in the accounts too. Frontline reported a June-quarter profit of US$659.2 million, against US$77.5 million a year earlier. Monday added to it: Brent rose about 1% to US$97.50 and WTI 0.9% to US$92.30 after fresh strikes over the weekend, which also pulled Woodside up 1.6% and Santos 1.7% on a flat ASX.
What to watch these rates come from a shortage of ships, not a shortage of oil. Whenever Hormuz reopens, the long routes shorten overnight, and the earnings that took months to build can unwind in a fortnight. |
| AUTOS |
Tesla put its robotaxi on the road and the stock fell 6% the next day
The Cybercab started carrying paying passengers in parts of Austin last week — a two-seater with butterfly doors, no steering wheel and no pedals. Investors were not charmed. Tesla closed Friday at US$354.08, down 5.92%, its worst day since 23 July.
What the event didn't say. The launch was invitation-only, wasn't livestreamed, and Elon Musk didn't turn up. Tesla named no further cities, gave no expansion timetable, no fare, and no delivery window for anyone hoping to buy one, though executives did describe pricing that rises with demand. Texas records showed 45 Cybercabs registered as of 3 September. Wells Fargo's note went out under the headline that the event underwhelmed; RBC Capital Markets said the questions on pricing, production pace and regulatory clearance were left unanswered.
The bigger problem arrived the same day. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a query into how Tesla self-certified the Cybercab as meeting federal motor vehicle safety standards, given it has no permanently fitted brake pedal, accelerator, steering wheel or mirrors. Carmakers in the United States certify their own compliance rather than seeking approval first, which works neatly until a vehicle turns up without the controls the standards were written around.
The open question whether a regulator will accept self-certification for a car built with nothing for a human to grab. Cities, fares and fleet size are all downstream of that answer, which is why none of them were announced. |
| RETAIL |
Lululemon fell 17% and traded below US$100 for the first time since 2018
The athletic-wear company closed Friday at US$99.97, down 17.9%, after second-quarter revenue fell 4% to US$2.4 billion and comparable sales — the measure that strips out new store openings — dropped 9%. In the Americas, its home market, comparable sales fell 12%.
The beat that wasn't. Lululemon's earnings technically came in ahead of forecasts, but 86 cents a share of that was a refund of tariffs the company had already paid — a cheque in the post rather than a sign anyone is buying more leggings. Analysts unpicked it within minutes of the release.
Then came the guidance, cut for the second time this year. Full-year revenue is now forecast at US$10.35 billion to US$10.5 billion, a decline of 5% to 7%, down from US$11 billion to US$11.15 billion previously. Earnings guidance dropped from US$10.95–11.15 a share to US$9.48–9.73. The current quarter is expected to shrink another 10% to 11%. Incoming chief executive Heidi O'Neill started on Tuesday, inheriting a forecast that already assumes the decline runs through Christmas.
The catch a cheap valuation only helps if the revenue stops falling, and the company's own numbers say it won't this year. The genuinely open question is whether shoppers have gone elsewhere or gone off the category entirely, and only the second one is fatal. |
Newsworthy numbers
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| US$105bn the financing Nvidia has agreed to backstop for a single OpenAI data centre campus in Pike County, Ohio, on a site that used to be a uranium enrichment plant. | | US$4,396 the price of an ounce of gold on Monday, down 0.8%, as firming odds of a Fed rate rise made an asset that pays no interest look less appealing. |
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| 385 metres the extra length Port of Tauranga has finally been cleared to add to its Sulphur Point container berth, after a consent fight that has been running for the better part of a decade. | | 1.481 Australian births per woman, a record low. New Zealand, for whatever it's worth, manages 1.66. |
Worth a read
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| 01 | NZ approaching longest-ever housing 'flat patch' — Three years of national house values going essentially nowhere, and economists think it stretches to 45 months before anything moves. Auckland is 24.5% below its peak, Wellington 27.2%. |
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| 02 | One Nation pushes for early super access for Australians paying rent or mortgage — The proposal would let about seven million people divert 3% of their 12% super into their pay packet for three years. The costing in the piece is the part worth reading: roughly $6,900 in hand, about $25,000 less at retirement. |
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| 03 | JM Smucker says it sold $1 billion worth of Uncrustables in FY2026 — A frozen crustless peanut butter sandwich has quietly become a billion-dollar brand with a 900,000-square-foot factory to itself, largely because adults chasing protein adopted a children's lunchbox product. |
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| 04 | Bats carry dangerous viruses without getting sick. This may be why — Tulane, Stanford and CDC researchers found more than 500 vesper bat species carry two separate sets of antibody genes, an arrangement never before seen in a mammal. |
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| 05 | Feminist activist and icon Gloria Steinem dies at 92 — She went undercover as a Playboy bunny to report on the working conditions, then spent fifty years being the most famous feminist alive. A good account of a genuinely consequential life. |
Wrapping up
The Federal Reserve meets on 15–16 September and futures put the odds of a rate rise near 60%, so the two inflation prints this week will do most of the deciding. American producer prices land on Thursday and August consumer prices on Friday, with economists looking for 3.4% on the year, 0.4% on the month and core at 2.4%. The European Central Bank votes on Thursday at 2.15pm Frankfurt time — 10.15pm Thursday in Sydney, 12.15am Friday in Auckland — and is expected to lift its deposit rate a quarter-point to 2.50%.
Oracle and Adobe both report after Thursday's close in New York. For Oracle, the line to find is how much of that enormous cloud backlog has actually converted into billed revenue, and what the capital spending bill looks like alongside it; for Adobe, whether subscription growth is holding as AI tools crowd into its market. Closer to home, Australia gets NAB business confidence and Westpac consumer sentiment today, China's trade figures land today and its inflation reading tomorrow, and the BusinessNZ manufacturing index closes the week on Friday.
The kiwi drifted a touch lower on Monday, with USD/NZD at 1.7018, while the Australian dollar pushed up to a four-month high and took USD/AUD down to 1.3850. The split is a rates story: markets put roughly an 80% chance on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand pausing next month after two increases this year, while pricing about a two-thirds chance the Reserve Bank of Australia hikes a fourth time on 29 September.
Back tomorrow with an actual American session to talk about.
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.