> ## 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 Hundred, Again - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-09-10/ - Published: 2026-09-09T22:44:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-09T22:44:52.000Z - Description: Apple launched a folding iPhone and quietly deleted the cheap one. - 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 newsletterThu 10 Sep 2026 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------- | | ![Today's edition](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/kicker-1.png)One Hundred, AgainPlus: Apple launched a folding iPhone and quietly deleted the cheap one. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | **Good morning, and welcome to Thursday.** Brent crude went back through US$100 a barrel for the first time since July, and the rest of the session arranged itself around that one number. The trigger was Tuesday's news that American forces had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers, four in the Gulf of Oman and one near Kharg Island. By the close nearly every sector of the S&P 500 was lower and the US 10-year Treasury yield sat at its highest since October 2023. The exceptions were narrow. Oil companies had a good day, Meta rose more than 5% after launching an AI agent called Muse, and Apple stood on a stage in Cupertino and unveiled a folding phone that costs about as much as a second-hand car. Somewhere in there is a fair summary of 2026. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,636.49▼ 0.48% | ​ | NASDAQ26,253.34▼ 0.64% | ​ | NZX 5013,819.43▲ 0.19% | | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | - | ---------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2008,911.40▼ 0.11% | ​ | USD/NZD1.7135▲ 0.30% | ​ | USD/AUD1.3858▲ 0.03% | US levels are Wednesday 9 September's official 4​pm New York close. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Wednesday's local closes, which happened before New York opened; currencies were taken late in Wednesday's New York session. | ​ | ENERGY | | - | ------ | ## Brent went back above US$100 and dragged the rest of the market with it Brent crude traded about 2.6% higher at US$100.44 a barrel on Wednesday, its first move above the triple-digit line since July. West Texas Intermediate did more of the work in percentage terms, up 3.9% to US$96.63\. The cause was a US Central Command statement that American forces had destroyed five Iranian crude tankers on Tuesday, in response to attempted missile attacks on a US Navy warship that the ship evaded without casualties. **Why Kharg Island is the sore spot.** The island sits about 24 kilometres off Iran's mainland and is the loading point for roughly 90% of the country's crude exports, so a strike there is aimed at the tap rather than the argument. Tehran answered by firing missiles at Jordan and having the Revolutionary Guard warn tanker crews at Kuwaiti and Bahraini piers to abandon their vessels. The Strait of Hormuz, which carried a fifth of the world's oil before the war began in February, has been effectively shut for months, so this is a squeeze on an already narrow pipe. Energy stocks were the only comfortable place to sit — Exxon Mobil closed up 2.13% at US$164.08\. Expensive crude arrives in sentiment immediately and in the inflation numbers with a lag, and American inflation is already uncomfortable: the July PCE measure the Federal Reserve watches most closely ran at 3.7% headline and 3.3% core. | What to watchthe August consumer price index lands on Friday in New York, the first official read that partly captures the fuel move. Futures have a September rate rise at a bit better than a coin flip, and Friday is what settles it. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | BIG TECH | | - | -------- | ## Apple launched a folding iPhone and quietly deleted the cheap one Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo on Wednesday, its first foldable, starting at US$1,999 for 256 gigabytes and running to US$3,199 for the two-terabyte version. It has a 7.6-inch inner display and a 5.4-inch outer one, and goes on sale in more than 70 countries on 23 October. It was the first keynote for chief executive John Ternus, who took over from Tim Cook on 1 September and called the Duo the most transformational change to the iPhone since the original. Shares fell as much as 2% during the presentation and finished down 0.2%, which is roughly what Apple stock always does on launch day. **The bigger change was at the bottom of the range.** Apple discontinued the standard iPhone 18 altogether. The Pro now starts at US$1,199 and the Pro Max at US$1,299, so the cheapest new iPhone is a Pro and the entry price to Apple's phone business has moved up several hundred dollars in one morning. Rising memory costs are the stated reason, and they are real. The strategic reason is that the iPhone is still around half of Apple's revenue and unit growth stopped being the story years ago. The other half of the plan went live in July, when Apple began leasing iPhones through Klarna from US$17.99 a month: make the number on the tag bigger, then make the number people actually think about smaller and monthly. | The tellthe launch-day share move has been a poor guide for two decades. What matters is the December-quarter mix — whether the average selling price rises by more than unit sales fall. That is the whole bet. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | BONDS | | - | ----- | ## The Treasury tripled its buyback and long yields rose anyway The US Treasury said on Wednesday it would purchase up to US$6 billion of longer-dated government debt in the first operation under its expanded buyback programme — triple the US$2 billion it had originally told investors to expect. The market's response was to sell bonds. The 10-year yield rose about six basis points to roughly 4.84%, its highest since October 2023. **What a buyback actually is.** The Treasury buys back its own older, less-traded bonds — here in the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year maturities — paying with cash it already holds. It is a plumbing exercise meant to improve trading conditions in corners of the bond market that have gone thin, not a reduction in what the government owes. Six more operations run through to 4 November at US$4 billion or more each, the next 30-year one on 24 September. Total federal debt passed US$40 trillion last month, and none of this changes that. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants long-term borrowing costs lower and argues yields do not reflect the underlying fundamentals. Strategists have been politely unconvinced, noting that market interventions have a long history of not working terribly well and that a few billion dollars of old bonds is tinkering at the edges of a forty-trillion-dollar problem. The 10-year also sets the tone for American mortgage rates, so this is not a bond-desk curiosity. | Not so fasta buyback can improve liquidity in a specific set of bonds. It cannot make investors keen to lend for thirty years at a fixed rate while oil is rising and the central bank is being asked to raise rates. Wednesday showed which of those forces is stronger. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | - | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | US$4.15the average price of a gallon of regular American petrol over the Labor Day weekend, a record for the holiday and about 25% dearer than a year ago. That was before crude crossed US$100. | ​ | 21,200working days lost to strikes and lockouts across Australia in the June quarter, down from 47,600 in the March quarter. The disputes numbered exactly the same, 49; they were just shorter and smaller. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | US$15.1 billionwhat Google will spend on artificial intelligence infrastructure in Finland over the next two years, its largest single investment in Europe. | ​ | US$134,000the top price fetched by a custom museum-quality dollhouse, in a miniatures industry that grew into a real business while nobody was looking. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 01 | **[Banks passed the full OCR rise to mortgages and gave savers as little as five basis points](https://newswire.co.nz/2026/09/banks-passed-full-ocr-rise-to-mortgages-savers-got-five-basis-points/?ref=sharespective.com)** — All five big New Zealand banks moved floating home loan rates the full 25 points, to between 6.29% and 6.39%. ANZ's Online Call savings account went up five, to 0.50%. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[One Nation pushes for early super access for Australians paying rent or mortgage](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/one-nation-pauline-hanson-rent-mortgage-super-retirement/107122814?ref=sharespective.com)** — About seven million people could divert 3% of their 12% super into take-home pay for three years. A 30-year-old would gain roughly $6,900 and give up more than $18,000 of compounding. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[The miniature housing market is a $2.5B business](https://thehustle.co/news/the-miniature-housing-market-is-a-2.5b-business?ref=sharespective.com)** — Adult dollhouses went from 17th-century status symbol to pandemic hobby to an industry with waiting lists. Tastemade's tiny-cooking videos pull around 45 million views a month. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[Was the 'American cheetah' a cheetah at all?](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/american-cheetah-puma-ancient-dna-diet?ref=sharespective.com)** — Ancient DNA says Miracinonyx trumani was a close relative of the puma, and that its Yukon populations lived largely on fish. A famous sprinter turns out to have been an Arctic fisherman. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[The Thief Who Wanted to Save the World](https://longreads.com/2026/09/08/austria-robbery-atavist-magazine/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Vienna's largest armed robbery, nearly three million euros from an armoured van in 2013, and the former police special-forces officer who confessed at once and said he had meant to build an orphanage with it. | ### Wrapping up The European Central Bank votes today and is expected to lift its deposit rate a quarter-point to 2.50%, which markets put at about 88% after euro-zone inflation hit 3.3% in August. American producer prices also land on Thursday, and August consumer prices follow on Friday at 8.30​am in New York — 10.30​pm Friday in Sydney, 12.30​am Saturday in Auckland. The Federal Reserve then meets on 15–16 September, announcing at 2​pm Washington time on the Wednesday, or 6​am Thursday in Auckland and 4​am in Sydney; futures have a quarter-point rise at roughly 56%. Oracle and Adobe both report after Thursday's close in New York. Oracle's remaining performance obligations — contracted work not yet delivered — stood at US$638 billion, with only about 12% of that due to be recognised as revenue within twelve months, so the line to find is how fast the backlog is converting and what the capital spending bill looks like beside it. For Adobe it is whether AI features are turning into paid subscriptions yet. Closer to home, New Zealand's June-quarter GDP arrives on Thursday 17 September, with Treasury pencilling in 0.2% growth, and Australia's August labour force figures follow on 24 September, five days before the RBA's decision on the 29th. The kiwi eased another 0.3% to US$0.5836, taking USD/NZD to 1.7135, while the Australian dollar was flat at US$0.7216 and left USD/AUD at 1.3858\. The cross is doing the real work: the Aussie hit its strongest against the kiwi since April 2013 this week, with markets pricing a September rise from the RBA while RBNZ officials talk about the cash rate already being near neutral. Back tomorrow, with an inflation print to chew on. ​ 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.