Daily newsletter · Sat 19 Sep 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Sat 19 Sep 2026 |
 The Damage Underneath Plus: Saudi Arabia says its bombed pipeline will be half-working within days. |
Good morning, and welcome to Saturday. The S&P 500 finished Friday about twelve points higher than it started, a number that suggests nothing much happened. Plenty happened. Netflix collected the only negative rating on its book and fell 4.66%. Nucor lost 6.33% after warning that its current quarter would come in well under what the market had pencilled in. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed back through 5%, four days after the Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023.
Friday was also triple witching, the quarterly expiry when index futures and index options run out together and the closing hour turns into a scrum. So a fair bit of Friday's flatness belongs to the calendar. The week the Fed finally started raising rates ended with the index almost exactly where it was on Thursday, which is not the sort of resolution anybody was promised.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,650.12 ▲ 0.16% | | NASDAQ 26,522.55 ▲ 0.39% | | NZX 50 13,739.14 ▼ 0.13% |
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ASX 200 8,731.20 ▼ 0.01% | | Netflix US$71.80 ▼ 4.66% | | Nucor US$248.37 ▼ 6.33% |
| MEDIA |
Netflix has 35 buy ratings, 16 holds and now one sell
Wells Fargo's Steven Cahall cut Netflix to underweight from equal weight on Friday morning, and the shares closed at US$71.80, down 4.66%. That was a fourth consecutive losing session, and it leaves the stock 22% lower than it started the year. Netflix, one of our preferred stocks, is covered by more than fifty analysts, and until Friday not one of them had a negative rating on it.
Cahall's argument is about viewing hours. Subscriber numbers are holding up. What he thinks is softening is engagement, meaning how much time each household actually spends watching. His base case has the viewing hours delivered by Netflix's hundred biggest original titles falling by roughly a fifth from a year ago, because the second-half slate is thinner than usual. People who watch less cancel more readily, so his worry runs into next year rather than this quarter.
Evercore ISI's Kutgun Maral reads the same company and comes out the other way. His case rests on how many households Netflix reaches, where Cahall's rests on hours per household. Cahall himself allowed he could be wrong, pointing to record content spending and a company with a long history of producing hits nobody saw coming.
What to watch Netflix reports its September quarter next month. The company stopped giving subscriber numbers in 2025, so whatever it chooses to say about viewing time is the thing that settles this. |
| ENERGY |
Saudi Arabia says half the bombed pipeline is back within days, and oil fell for a third session
Brent settled at US$102.41 on Friday, down 2.30%. West Texas Intermediate finished at US$100.04, off 1.84%. Both have now fallen three days running, and Brent has given back more than five dollars from the US$108 it touched on 14 September. The whole retreat comes down to a repair timetable.
Why one pipeline moves the global oil price. The East-West line runs 1,200 kilometres from the Saudi oilfields on the Gulf across to Yanbu on the Red Sea. It was built in the 1980s for exactly one reason: so that Saudi crude could reach a buyer without passing through the Strait of Hormuz. With Hormuz effectively shut by Iran this year, roughly five million barrels a day had been going down it. Drones launched from Iraq hit the line on 10 September and the kingdom shut it as a precaution.
Regional officials initially put the repair at three to five weeks. On Friday the Saudis said about half the capacity would be back within days and the full line within about six weeks. In the meantime they have been moving barrels through Hormuz on smaller shuttle vessels and loading more crude through Oman, which is slower and dearer but keeps the oil flowing.
The catch oil above US$100 is what dragged the Fed back into raising rates, and Friday's yield move says the bond market is not yet convinced the energy problem is fixed. A pipeline that comes back on schedule solves one bottleneck. Hormuz is still closed. |
| STEEL |
Nucor's guidance looked worse than it was because last quarter was flattered
Nucor told the market on Thursday evening that it expects to earn between US$5.55 and US$5.65 a share in the September quarter, against a consensus sitting around US$6. The shares dropped 6.33% on Friday to US$248.37, and Steel Dynamics was dragged down with it. On the face of it, a large steelmaker just missed by a wide margin.
The gap is mostly in the comparison. Nucor's June quarter carried two things that will not happen again. One was a US$61 million gain from revaluing its stake in Helion, the fusion energy company. The other was US$130 million of refunds on raw materials bought in earlier periods. Both landed in the same three months and both lifted the base that this quarter is being measured against. Nucor also said its steel mills and steel products divisions should each earn more than last quarter on higher selling prices and steady volumes, with raw materials the one weak leg.
For scale, Nucor made US$2.63 a share in the same quarter of 2025. The midpoint of Friday's guidance is more than double that. The stock fell because the number missed a forecast, and the forecast had been built on a quarter that was not quite what it looked like.
Our take one-off gains are a nuisance for exactly this reason. They make a good quarter look excellent, and they make the ordinary quarter that follows look like a stumble. |
Newsworthy numbers
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60% how much the average US diesel price has risen since the war with Iran began in late February. It went above US$6 a gallon for the first time on 11 September. | | 28.2% the share of New Zealand residents born overseas, on the NZ Initiative's comparison of 29 countries. Only Singapore, Switzerland and Australia are higher. |
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A$4.8trn Australia's total superannuation assets at the end of the June quarter. Employers tipped in A$164.4 billion over the year, up 9.6%. | | US$42.9m paid in August for a 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona coupe once owned by Carroll Shelby, the most valuable American car ever sold at auction. It beat the 1935 Duesenberg SSJ record by more than twenty million dollars. |
Worth a read
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01 | What a $460,000 KiwiSaver balance actually gives you a week in retirement — A useful antidote to balance-projection calculators, which are very good at producing a big number and very bad at telling you what it buys. Worth reading alongside Labour's proposal to lift employer contributions to 6% by 2032. |
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02 | Nearly half of Gen Z Australians expect to retire still paying a mortgage — Vanguard surveyed more than 1,800 Australians. Of those expecting to carry housing debt into retirement, 39% plan to clear it with a single lump sum out of their super, which is not what super was built to do. |
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03 | America's memory chip crunch — Three companies make almost all the world's memory, and data centres are now taking between half and seventy per cent of what they produce. That is why Dell is putting PC prices up 15 to 20 per cent. |
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04 | Astronomers have found a planet less than a million years old — Elias 2-24 b is roughly Jupiter's mass, orbits a star 450 light-years away, and should not exist yet. Models say a planet that size needs at least five million years to assemble. |
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05 | Annie Dillard has died at 81 — She won the Pulitzer in 1975 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book about sitting still and paying attention to a stream in Virginia. The passage where she watches a water bug kill a frog is still the most quoted paragraph in American nature writing. |
Wrapping up
The Reserve Bank of Australia meets on Tuesday 29 September, with the decision at 5.30pm in Auckland and 2.30pm in Sydney. Pricing across the main trackers runs anywhere from 70% to above 90% for a quarter-point rise to 4.60%, after Michele Bullock said upside inflation risks were materialising. Before that, US flash manufacturing and services PMIs land on Wednesday in New York, and durable goods orders follow on Friday.
Costco reports after the US close on Thursday, which is 9am Friday in Auckland and 7am in Sydney. Membership fee income is the line worth finding, because it is the part of Costco that behaves like a subscription business. Micron follows on 30 September with memory pricing in focus, and Accenture on 1 October. Closer to home, ANZ's business and consumer confidence readings are out at the end of the month.
USD/NZD sits at 1.75, with the kiwi near a ten-week low after a fourth straight weekly fall against a US dollar that the Fed has just made more attractive to hold. USD/AUD is at 1.40, the Aussie firmer on Bullock's hawkish turn.
Have a good weekend, and we'll see you Monday.