Daily newsletter · Tue 22 Sep 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Tue 22 Sep 2026 |
 The CPU Comeback Plus: Paramount settles with a dozen states and clears the last obstacle to owning Warner Bros. |
Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday. Meta put a personal AI assistant called Muse in front of the public a fortnight ago. On Monday the market worked out who else gets paid when people use it, and the answer turned out to be Intel. The most written-off chipmaker of the AI era rose 12.14%, Arm Holdings added 17.16%, and the NASDAQ Composite closed at a record for the first time since June.
Oil did the rest. Brent gave up 3.4% as Saudi cargoes came back through the Strait of Hormuz and Donald Trump said he might sit down with Iran's president in New York this week. Cheaper crude pulled Treasury yields down with it. Everything rallied except the companies that pump the stuff.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,764.70 ▲ 1.49% | | NASDAQ 27,122.09 ▲ 2.26% | | NZX 50 13,821.20 ▲ 0.60% |
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ASX 200 8,731.13 ▼ 0.01% | | Meta US$741.25 ▲ 11.43% | | Warner Bros. Discovery US$30.80 ▲ 10.79% |
| TECHNOLOGY |
A consumer app sent Wall Street back to the chipmakers it had given up on
Meta Platforms, one of our preferred stocks, closed at US$741.25 on Monday, up 11.43%. Muse launched on 8 September. It books the flight, pays the bill and works through the inbox on your behalf, and by Monday the buying had spread to the companies whose silicon has to run all that. Intel finished at US$121.78, up 12.14%, and Arm Holdings at US$322.90, up 17.16%. AMD rose 9.95%. The NASDAQ Composite gained 2.26% to 27,122.09.
What an agent does to a chip order. Answering a question costs one run of a trained model against live data, which the industry calls inference. An agent that books a trip makes dozens of those calls, checks the results and calls again. Graphics processors do the heavy arithmetic, but ordinary processors sit alongside them directing traffic and shifting data, and that is the part of the market Intel and Arm own. Arm takes a royalty on server chips built to its designs. Intel's chief executive has said the company can meet only half the demand it is being shown.
None of this was an order. A consumer app got popular, and traders priced a chain of purchases no chipmaker has announced. HP was on the same tape, down 4.75% after warning that global PC shipments will shrink by a mid-single-digit percentage in 2027. Processors are having a wonderful time in the data centre and a miserable one on desks.
The tell whether agent workloads turn up in a chipmaker's own guidance. Until one of them puts a number on it, Monday was a bet placed on an app store ranking. |
| ENERGY |
Oil handed back its war premium in a single session
Brent crude settled just above US$100 a barrel on Monday, down 3.4%. The West Texas contract expiring on Tuesday fell about 4.5% to under US$96, and both benchmarks landed at their lowest in 12 days. Energy was the one corner of the American market having a bad day while the rest of it rallied.
Where the premium came from. Yemen's Houthis have been attacking Saudi Arabia, including Riyadh itself and an Aramco facility at Yanbu on the Red Sea. That shut the East-West pipeline and forced Saudi crude back through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel Iran sits beside. Exports collapsed. They are now coming back: satellite tracking put Saudi oil through Hormuz at 2.9 million barrels a day over six days, against 700,000 a day in August, and Aramco loaded about 14 million barrels onto seven supertankers on Sunday alone.
The diplomacy did the rest. Trump told Fox News he would probably be open to meeting Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at the UN General Assembly this week. Oil prices set inflation expectations, and inflation expectations set long bond yields, which is why the US 10-year Treasury yield eased back below 5% on Monday after touching a 19-year high of 5.041% last Tuesday. Cheaper crude buys the Federal Reserve room it did not have a week ago.
A word of caution nothing has been settled. The Houthis have not stopped, the pipeline is still down, and a single missile would put the premium back faster than a week of talks took it out. |
| MEDIA |
Paramount settled with 12 states and cleared the last obstacle to owning Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Discovery closed at US$30.80 on Monday, up 10.79%, and Paramount Skydance rose about 5%. California's attorney general Rob Bonta led a dozen states that sued in July to stop Paramount's roughly US$110 billion purchase of the studio, arguing the combined company could push prices up across film and television. Those states settled.
What Paramount gave up. It has promised to put 30 films a year into cinemas for two years and 32 a year for the three after that, and to pay US$30 million for every film it falls short by. It will spend an extra US$300 million a year on production in the United States, commit to five-year theatrical release terms, and freeze the rates it charges cinema operators for three years. CBS News and CNN get a board meant to protect their editorial independence. The Writers Guild of America settled at the same time.
European and British regulators cleared the deal some time ago, and the state lawsuit was the last domestic case of any size. Bonta called the outcome a strong antitrust result while saying he would still rather the two companies stayed apart.
In a nutshell Hollywood gets a studio roughly the size of Netflix and Disney, with a quota of films written into a legal settlement and a penalty for missing it. |
Newsworthy numbers
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392,700 people added to Australia's population in the year to March, taking it to 27.92 million. Net overseas migration was 292,100 of that, down from 309,500 a year earlier. | | NZ$9.50 Fonterra's forecast farmgate milk price for 2026/27, lifted on Monday from NZ$9.25 after a better run of Global Dairy Trade auctions. |
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US$1 trillion AMD's market value at Monday's close, making it the 14th American company to get there. It spent most of the AI boom being described as the other chipmaker. | | US$7 million what Paramount owes Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders for every day the takeover stays unfinished past 30 September. Monday's settlement arrived with nine days on the clock. |
Worth a read
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01 | Average KiwiSaver balance cracks $40k — The Financial Markets Authority puts the average balance at $40,340 across 3.4 million members. The number underneath it is 1.4 million members not contributing regularly. |
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02 | Australian bond yields hit a 15-year high — The 10-year is at 5.20%, its highest since 2011, which reaches fixed mortgage rates and superannuation balances by different routes. AMP's My Bui explains why a bond move shows up in a share-heavy super fund. |
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03 | We tracked a shipment of rare books to an Amazon AI training facility — Emanuel Maiberg hid a tracker in a rare book and followed it to a Las Vegas warehouse where staff cut the spines off to scan the pages faster. The company that started by selling books is now destroying the scarce ones. |
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04 | New Hubble images reveal a bizarre decagon over Saturn's south pole — A ten-sided jet stream, sibling to the famous hexagon at the north pole, spotted first by amateur astronomers. Saturn's tilt hid its south pole from Earth between 2012 and 2023, so nobody knows when it formed. |
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05 | Then they came for the ostriches — J.B. MacKinnon in Harper's on the several hundred people who camped in British Columbia to stop a cull of about 300 ostriches after an avian flu outbreak. A suspected kill facility catches fire, helicopters circle, and everyone present reads a different meaning into it. |
Wrapping up
No Federal Reserve this week, and the central bank that matters most to this readership meets next Tuesday. The Reserve Bank of Australia announces at 2.30pm Sydney time on 29 September, which is 4.30pm in Auckland, and markets have a quarter-point rise to 4.60% at roughly 87%. CBA and ANZ both pulled their forecasts forward to next week on Monday, which puts all four big banks on the same side. Before that, US flash PMIs for September land at 1.45am Thursday in Auckland and 11.45pm Wednesday in Sydney, with durable goods orders on Friday.
Costco reports after Thursday's US close, at 8am Friday in Auckland and 6am in Sydney, and the line worth finding is membership fee income. AutoZone also reports this week. Australia's August labour force survey is out at 1.30pm Thursday in Auckland and 11.30am in Sydney, with the unemployment rate at 4.5% in July and the Reserve Bank reading it five days before it votes. Trump and Xi Jinping meet at the White House on Thursday, Washington time.
USD/NZD sits at 1.75 and USD/AUD at 1.40, both within a whisker of where they ended last week. The Australian dollar is the one with a live story attached, given how much of next Tuesday's rate rise is already in the price.
Back tomorrow.