> ## 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. # The Good News Problem - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-09-24/ - Published: 2026-09-23T21:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T20:59:59.000Z - Description: McDonald's asks shareholders to pay for a decade of renovations. - Author: Shaun Botha - Tags: Daily | ![](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 24 Sep 2026 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------- | | ![Today's edition](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/kicker-1.png)The Good News Problem**Plus:** McDonald's asks shareholders to pay for a decade of renovations. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | **Good morning.** American business had its best month in five years and the stock market sold off. S&P Global's flash survey of private-sector activity came in at 58.4 for September, the bond market read that as inflation, and the S&P 500 closed down 0.75% at 7,706.03\. The NASDAQ Composite lost 1.13%. Oil added to it. Brent rose 3.9% to US$103.08 a barrel after Iran's president Masoud Pezeshkian said his country would not surrender to Washington. Cheaper crude was doing the Federal Reserve a favour last week, and it has stopped. In company news, Paychex fell 8.77% after its largest division grew 4% against full-year guidance of 5% to 6%. Elsewhere, Cracker Barrel rose 4.49% on quarterly earnings of 99 US cents a share against the 26 cents expected. Finally, General Mills added 1.04% after beating on both sales and profit. Good news, badly received. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,706.03**▼ 0.75%** | ​ | NASDAQ26,936.04**▼ 1.13%** | ​ | NZX 5013,821.76**▼ 0.39%** | | -------------------------- | - | ------------------------------ | - | -------------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2008,765.30**▲ 0.09%** | ​ | McDonald'sUS$238.32**▼ 4.81%** | ​ | IonQUS$42.54**▲ 4.42%** | US levels are Wednesday 23 September's closes in New York. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Wednesday's local closes. The McDonald's and IonQ rows are that session's closing share price and that session's move. | ​ | RATES | | - | ----- | ## A survey of American business pushed Treasury yields to a 2007 high S&P Global's flash composite index of American private-sector activity rose to 58.4 in September from 56.0 in August, the highest reading since July 2021\. Manufacturing came in at 57.0 against the 53.7 economists expected. Services reached 58.7 against 55.8. **Strong growth has become a problem for the bond market.** Inflation is still running above the Fed's 2% target, and the central bank raised rates last Wednesday for the first time since 2023\. A survey this warm says the economy could take more of that. Traders repriced it in a hurry. The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.135%, its highest since July 2007, and the two-year pushed above 4.9%. Odds on another quarter-point rise at the 27-28 October meeting went to 73% on CME's FedWatch, from 53% the day before. Fed governor Michael Barr added to the mood, saying more policy adjustment is likely before inflation comes back to target. Smaller companies wore most of the damage, with the Russell 2000 down 1.77% against 0.68% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. | Our readthe 5% yield is the number that matters here, because every valuation in this market is measured against it. I'd want October's data to back up the survey before treating one flash reading as the new trend. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | RESTAURANTS | | - | ----------- | ## McDonald's is spending US$8.5 billion on its franchisees and the shares fell 4.81% McDonald's closed at US$238.32 on Wednesday, down 4.81%, after an investor day where it set out a plan called NEXT. The company will put about US$8.5 billion behind its franchisees between now and 2036, as a mix of rent relief and capital support. **The money goes to the people who own the restaurants.** Franchisees pay for the equipment and the renovations, and McDonald's is offering to carry part of that bill. The company also says a generative AI system called ArchIQ can lift efficiency at store level by about 2.5 percentage points. The timing is what shareholders objected to. Spending starts now and the payback runs across a decade. Management also pushed its target of 50,000 restaurants back a year to 2028, blaming cautious customers and the cost of building. Nobody else in the industry took the same hit. Wendy's slipped about 1% and Yum! Brands rose 0.4%, which makes Wednesday's selling a verdict on this plan rather than on fast food generally. | The catchthe cash leaves on a schedule and the efficiency gain is a target. I'd judge this one on average sales per restaurant in a year's time rather than on anything said at an investor day. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | ​ | QUANTUM | | - | ------- | ## IonQ says an ordinary processor can keep a quantum computer honest Quantum computers make mistakes constantly, because the particles doing the arithmetic are disturbed by almost anything. Catching those errors while a calculation is still running, without slowing it down, is the industry's hardest engineering problem. IonQ said on Tuesday it had managed it on a single off-the-shelf processor. **So why does the processor matter?** The decoder is the part that spots an error and orders the fix, and the assumption has been that it needs purpose-built silicon sitting beside the machine. IonQ ran its version across 408 logical qubits and more than 31.5 million operations, and says it added 0.02% to the run time. IonQ had hardware news as well. Its Superion 256 will be the first quantum machine installed on site at Nvidia's Accelerated Quantum Research Center, wired in through Nvidia's NVQLink and driven by its CUDA-Q software. Installation is scheduled for 2027. The shares got ahead of themselves and then came back. IonQ traded 11% higher at US$45.29 during the morning and closed at US$42.54, up 4.42%, as rising yields pulled the air out of speculative technology. Rigetti and D-Wave rose alongside it. | What to watchthat 2027 installation. Error correction running on cheap hardware changes the cost of every machine IonQ builds, and the first proof of it is a customer taking delivery. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | - | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | US$4,318where gold closed on Wednesday, down 1.3%, as higher yields made a metal that pays no interest harder to justify holding. | ​ | 285 millionbarrels of oil left in America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the week to 11 September, the lowest since 1982\. Washington has drained about 130 million barrels of it this year to hold prices down. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | NZ$978.2 millionfees deducted from KiwiSaver accounts in the year to 31 March, up 12.6% on the Financial Markets Authority's count. Another NZ$21.8 million takes the annual bill past a billion. | ​ | 1 million yearsthe age of Elias 2-24b, the youngest planet ever photographed, 454 light-years away in Ophiuchus. It is still gathering material, which at that age is fair enough. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | 01 | **[BNZ raises most home loan rates, but holds or cuts two key ones](https://www.interest.co.nz/personal-finance/140353/bnz-positions-itself-competitive-spring-real-estate-season-sharp-offerings?ref=sharespective.com)** — The one-year fixed rate goes to 5.19% and the five-year to 5.75%, while the two-year comes down 10 basis points to 5.35%. Worth a look if you are refixing into a spring that no longer looks like a falling-rate market. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[Dario Amodei wants to slow AI. China isn't taking orders](https://restofworld.org/2026/china-rejects-dario-amodei-anthropic-ai-slowdown-trump-xi/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Kinling Lo on how Anthropic's call for a global slowdown landed in Beijing, where engineers and officials read it as a way of protecting an American lead. One developer asks why the same side always gets to set the rules. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[Can this startup cool data centres without water?](https://thehustle.co/news/can-this-startup-cool-data-centers-without-water?ref=sharespective.com)** — Bill Meincke on Karman Industries, which runs carbon dioxide in a closed loop instead. A single 100-megawatt data centre gets through as much water in a day as 2,600 households do. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[Geothermal amoeba found thriving at 63 degrees Celsius](https://www.sci.news/biology/incendiamoeba-cascadensis-15086.html?ref=sharespective.com)** — Complex cells were assumed to give up around 60°C. This one divides at 63°C in a creek in Lassen Volcanic National Park, and it has relatives in New Zealand's geothermal pools. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[He was one of the world's most wanted men, so he bought a West African country](https://longreads.com/2026/09/23/jos-leijdekkers-sierra-leone/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Alexander Clapp in 1843 on Jos Leijdekkers, an Antwerp trafficker who turned Sierra Leone into a cocaine corridor. A mining investor warns him that governments there arrange car crashes for people who ask too much. | ### Wrapping up New Zealand is the central bank story now. Money markets have a rise to 3.00% at the 28 October review at about 75%, after Governor Anna Breman said persistent oil prices point to firmer inflation in the near term. The Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 2.75% on 2 September. Micron reports on 30 September, and the line to find is whether high-bandwidth memory stays sold out through 2027\. Australia's June-quarter household wealth figures land at 11.30​am today Sydney time, 1.30​pm in Auckland, with the March quarter's balance sheet at A$19.2 trillion. USD/NZD is at 1.76, the kiwi at an eleven-week low after Wednesday's yield move pulled money into the US dollar. USD/AUD is at 1.41. New Zealand's clocks go forward on Sunday. Back tomorrow. ​ General information and commentary only, not financial advice. It does not take account of your objectives, financial situation or needs, and reflects the author's own reading of public information at the time of writing, which may be wrong. Sharespective, its people and its clients may hold positions in the companies covered. Do your own research and talk to a licensed adviser.