Daily newsletter · Wed 23 Sep 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Wed 23 Sep 2026 |
 The Maintenance Dose Plus: a 6.95% mortgage rate turns up in KB Home's numbers. |
Good morning. The S&P 500 finished Tuesday six hundredths of a point lower, at 7,764.64, which is about as close to unchanged as a 500-stock index gets. The NASDAQ Composite went the other way to a second record close in a row, up 0.45% to 27,244.28.
Oil did the steering again. A senior Iranian official said the Strait of Hormuz could reopen within seven days if Washington lifts its blockade. Brent fell 2.1% to US$98.23 a barrel and the US 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.92%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.36% anyway.
In company news, SanDisk rose more than 5% after Rosenblatt Securities began covering it with a buy rating on the strength of AI demand for memory chips. Elsewhere, GameStop added about 4% after chief executive Ryan Cohen disclosed a US$26.4 million purchase of his own company's shares. Finally, PayPal climbed after Meta added it as a checkout option inside Muse.
Flat, but not quiet.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,764.64 ▼ 0.00% | | NASDAQ 27,244.28 ▲ 0.45% | | NZX 50 13,875.48 ▲ 0.39% |
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ASX 200 8,758 ▲ 0.30% | | Viking Therapeutics US$39.89 ▲ 32.50% | | AutoZone US$2,963.34 ▲ 5.71% |
| PHARMA |
Viking's obesity drug held the weight off when patients dosed less often
Viking Therapeutics closed at US$39.89 on Tuesday, up 32.5%. The company had released results from a mid-stage trial of VK2735, an injection that copies two of the gut hormones the body uses to say it has eaten enough.
Patients on the strongest doses lost 22% of their body weight over 33 weeks.
The interesting part came after the weight came off. For the first 21 weeks the 180 participants took a weekly shot, and weight loss ran from 16% to 19%. They then moved to an injection every second week, or once a month. The fortnightly group kept 90% of what they had lost and the monthly group kept 85%.
Staying on the treatment is this industry's soft spot, and the trade knows it. Viking reported almost nobody leaving over side effects: one person during the weekly phase, one on fortnightly dosing and three on monthly.
The rest of the obesity complex sat still. Eli Lilly, one of our preferred stocks, rose 1.1% and Novo Nordisk slipped 0.7%. Traders took it as one company's drug getting better rather than the market getting bigger.
Our read the late-stage trials are the thing to watch, because they test doses only up to 17.5mg a week. The cohorts that produced Tuesday's numbers ran to 22.5mg. I'd want to see the every-second-week schedule hold up in a trial designed to register it. |
| RETAIL |
The average American car is now 12.9 years old, and AutoZone is collecting
AutoZone closed at US$2,963.34 on Tuesday, up 5.71%, after fourth-quarter earnings of US$56.05 a share against the US$53.99 consensus. Sales of US$6.6 billion grew 5.6% and came in slightly light. Advance Auto Parts rose about 6% and O'Reilly Automotive about 4% on the read-across.
Old cars are the entire business. S&P Global Mobility has the average vehicle on American roads at 12.9 years, another record. A car that age needs parts, and the owner either buys them over the counter or pays a workshop that does.
The workshops are where the growth is. AutoZone's domestic commercial arm, the counter that supplies repair shops, lifted sales 8.6% to US$1.9 billion in the quarter. The company opened 175 stores in three months and now runs 8,031.
The profit had help. Gross margin widened by 1.8 percentage points, and 1.45 points of that came from tariff refunds owed to the company after the Supreme Court struck down the emergency tariffs in February. That is money back on duties already paid, and it arrives once.
The catch take the refund out and the margin gain is ordinary, while same-store sales in the United States grew 1.6%. The age of the national car fleet is what pays for this, and it has gone up in each of the past three years. |
| HOUSING |
KB Home sold a fifth fewer houses and said the market has got worse since June
KB Home reported after Tuesday's close in New York. Revenue fell 20% to US$1.30 billion and deliveries fell 19% to 2,732 homes. Earnings of US$1.05 a share still beat the US$0.90 consensus, and the shares barely moved afterwards.
A mortgage rate is doing most of this. Freddie Mac put the 30-year fixed rate at 6.95% last week, a 19-month high, in the same week the Federal Reserve raised rates for the first time since 2023. Executive chairman Jeffrey Mezger said conditions have weakened since the June quarter.
The industry numbers agree. The National Association of Home Builders' sentiment index fell three points to 32 in September, the weakest in a year, with 38% of builders cutting prices and 66% handing out incentives.
Not everyone is backing away. Berkshire Hathaway disclosed purchases of about US$212 million of Lennar shares last week and now owns more than 10% of the builder. KB Home's own backlog grew 2% to 4,398 homes, its first increase in four years.
What to watch August new home sales, due on Thursday in New York. KB Home has kept its full-year delivery guidance of 10,500 to 11,000 homes. Meeting it takes a strong fourth quarter out of a market management has just called weaker. |
Newsworthy numbers
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A$104bn the value of 33 Australian data centre projects on Deloitte Access Economics' investment tracker, four times the figure a year earlier. Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock told a Sydney audience on Tuesday that the build is adding to demand now and may pay for itself later. | | US$100bn tariff refunds paid out by the US government through the end of July, roughly 60% of what it owes importers since the Supreme Court decision. |
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38,300 the net loss of New Zealand citizens in the year to July. Overall net migration still ran at a gain of 20,300, because arrivals of non-citizens more than covered it. | | 20 metres the length of Dasosaurus tocantinensis, a sauropod dug out from under a rail terminal being built in Maranhão, Brazil. It had been lying there for 120 million years, so the schedule slipped for a decent reason. |
Worth a read
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01 | Warning over silent $100,000 superannuation hit as the largest fund lifts fees — AustralianSuper's 3.6 million members pay between $1.83 and $5.97 more a week from the end of October, and the annual admin fee cap rises from $350 to $600. Canstar's Sally Tindall runs the sums on a 0.59 percentage point fee gap over a working life: about $94,200. |
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02 | Meta's AI agent has been blocked from using Amazon.com — Amazon began blocking Muse on Sunday night and now serves it a message saying an unauthorised AI agent breaches its conditions of use. Russell Brandom on why the largest retailer in the country will not have a rival's shopping bot at its till. |
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03 | How do Necco wafers, paper receipts and farmers' almanacs still exist? — Katherine Laidlaw on three products that should have died years ago. The Old Farmer's Almanac turns over US$31.6 million a year selling long-range forecasts to people who own gardens rather than farms. |
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04 | Scientists recreated what mice saw from brain activity alone — Joel Bauer's team at UCL recorded individual neurons in the visual cortex and rebuilt 10-second clips of what the animal had been watching. It worked on videos the mice had never seen during training. |
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05 | The ruins of a long-lost medieval convent have been found beneath a soccer field — St Clare's convent in Roskilde, Denmark, was founded in 1256 and sits about a metre under a pitch that has been played on since 1961. Ground-penetrating radar picked out the church, the cloisters and a 70-metre building with four wings, all because the council wanted to put a car park there. |
Wrapping up
No Federal Reserve this week. The Reserve Bank of Australia decides next Tuesday at 2.30pm Sydney time, which is 4.30pm in Auckland, and the market has about 90% odds on a quarter-point rise to 4.60%. US flash PMIs for September arrive overnight, 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 membership renewal rates are the line to find. Australia's August labour force survey is out at 1.30pm Thursday in Auckland and 11.30am in Sydney, with economists expecting 20,000 jobs and unemployment steady at 4.5%.
USD/NZD is at 1.74, the kiwi up about 0.4% as American yields came off their highs. USD/AUD sits at 1.40 and has not moved since Friday.
Spring is here, the mornings are lighter, and we're back tomorrow.