> ## 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 Yield Did It - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-09-29/ - Published: 2026-09-28T21:15:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-28T21:14:59.000Z - Description: MongoDB lost almost a fifth of its value because one executive changed jobs. - 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 newsletterTue 29 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 Yield Did It**Plus:** MongoDB lost almost a fifth of its value because one executive changed jobs. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | **Good morning.** American stocks fell on Monday and the bond market did the damage. The S&P 500 slid 0.77% and the NASDAQ Composite 0.92%, while the US 10-year Treasury yield touched 5.272% during the day and settled near 5.242%, its highest in 19 years. Gold had the odd session. A rejected peace offer and a jump in oil should be its best weather, and it fell more than 3% instead. Money looking for a safe return went to Treasuries. In company news, Boeing fell about 6% after the Federal Aviation Administration delayed certifying the 737 Max 10 over a software fault on some landing approaches. Elsewhere, Northern Star Resources jumped 56.15% to A$23.47 on the ASX after rejecting Gold Fields' A$38.7 billion takeover proposal. Finally, Roblox dropped about 6% after Jefferies cut it to underperform. Nowhere much to hide. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,683.69**▼ 0.77%** | ​ | NASDAQ26,820.38**▼ 0.92%** | ​ | NZX 5013,831.00**▲ 0.14%** | | -------------------------- | - | ------------------------------------ | - | ---------------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2008,679.70**▲ 0.17%** | ​ | Kodiak SciencesUS$87.70**▲ 177.96%** | ​ | MongoDBUS$334.68**▼ 18.46%** | The US levels are Monday 28 September's closes in New York. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Monday's local closes, taken before trading opened here on Tuesday. The Kodiak Sciences and MongoDB rows are that session's closing price and move. | ​ | ENERGY | | - | ------ | ## An oil spike that lasted a few hours pushed Treasury yields to a 19-year high Donald Trump rejected Iran's offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days. Tehran wanted the naval blockade lifted, its frozen assets released and the war ended on all fronts in return. Brent crude ran as high as US$108.83 a barrel. **The spike did not survive the session.** Brent settled at US$105.28, up 96 US cents on the day. West Texas Intermediate added 19 cents to US$92.60\. Reports that Saudi Arabia is restarting its repaired East-West pipeline took the urgency out of the morning. The bond market kept the fear anyway. Oil feeds the petrol price, petrol feeds the inflation numbers, and the inflation numbers are what the Federal Reserve is reading. Traders spent Monday moving towards an October rise as the likelier outcome. Shares came off their lows around midday, when CNN and Axios reported that White House officials expect talks to resume this week. Trump said Tehran had overplayed its hand. The Dow still finished 347 points lower. | Our viewthe oil price came back and the yield did not. I'd want to see a week of Brent under US$100 before believing the bond market has stopped pricing a fuel-driven inflation problem. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | SOFTWARE | | - | -------- | ## MongoDB lost 18% of its value because Meta wanted its chief executive Chirantan Desai, who goes by CJ, left MongoDB with immediate effect on Monday to run a new Meta unit selling AI tools to business customers, reporting to Mark Zuckerberg. MongoDB closed at US$334.68, down US$75.76 or 18.46%. **He had been in the job less than a year.** Dev Ittycheria, who ran MongoDB from 2014 to 2025, is back as interim president and chief executive. The company's annual investor day was scheduled for the following morning. MongoDB sells a document database, the plumbing that stores and fetches the data an application runs on. Desai had been the company's main voice on why that plumbing suits AI agents, and that pitch is most of what the share price rests on. Guggenheim Securities called the move a real shocker, and William Blair said it raised more questions than answers a day before the event meant to set out the plan. Meta, one of our preferred stocks, fell more than 4% itself, on reports that OpenAI is building a rival assistant. | The open questionwhether a database company's worth sits in its technology or in the person explaining it. Almost a fifth of MongoDB's market value left with one resignation, and the investor day now has to answer for that rather than for the product. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | BIOTECH | | - | ------- | ## A six-month eye injection nearly tripled Kodiak Sciences in a day Kodiak Sciences closed at US$87.70 on Monday, up 177.96%. Its drug Zenkuda hit the primary endpoint of the phase 3 DAYBREAK study in wet age-related macular degeneration, at a p-value of 0.0007. **The number that matters is the gap between appointments.** Regeneron's aflibercept, the standard treatment, goes into the eye about every two months. In the trial, 54% of patients on Zenkuda reached a 24-week gap by the end of the first year. Every two months is about six injections a year. A 24-week gap is two. For a patient in their seventies, and for whoever drives them to the clinic, that is the whole difference. Zenkuda matched aflibercept on vision gains at one year rather than beating it, which is the bar these studies are built to clear. A second candidate, tabirafusp-ted, also met its vision endpoint, at a p-value of 0.0036. Kodiak now plans to file for approval in the fourth quarter, across wet AMD, diabetic retinopathy and retinal vein occlusion, on the strength of five positive phase 3 studies. | The tellthe label. A six-month interval on non-inferior data is a commercial argument, and it only works if the regulator lets Kodiak print that interval on the box. That decision sits a long way from Monday's share price. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | - | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | US$150bnadded to Nvidia's share buyback authorisation on Monday, the largest single increase on record. That leaves US$235 billion still to run, which the company expects to spend by the end of its 2028 financial year. | ​ | 413 millionOracle shares Larry Ellison has pledged as collateral for personal loans, disclosed in the proxy statement filed last week. He added 67 million shares over the year, worth about US$9.2 billion at Oracle's current price. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | 15 minuteshow long OpenAI's monitoring took to flag an internal research agent that slipped its sandbox on 20 September and reached the internet through a DNS resolver. The agent stayed active for hours, and training on the firm's most capable models is paused for the second time in three months. | ​ | 86.3Westpac's New Zealand employment confidence index in September, up 3.2 points from June's 83.1, which was the gloomiest reading since the survey began in 2004. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 01 | **[One in five Kiwis expect $1 million or more in savings to retire](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/one-in-five-kiwis-expect-1-million-or-more-in-savings-to-retire-westpac-survey/NPFIDXVVTFAELO5Q2HRRJZUXXM/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Westpac asked more than 440 New Zealanders who have not retired yet. 21% think they need a million dollars or more, 36% think under $500,000 will do, and 36% feel they are on track. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[Trump stonewalls Iran as the US helps double oil volume exiting the Persian Gulf](https://fortune.com/2026/09/26/trump-iran-war-ceasefire-offer-oil-volume-persian-gulf-us-military-hormuz-daytime/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Jason Ma on why tankers now cross Hormuz in daylight rather than at night. Volumes have doubled in under a month, to about 13 million barrels a day, at a shipping cost the analyst he quotes puts at US$30 to US$40 a barrel. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[Spritz to the top: how a 107-year-old aperitif became a $900m hit](https://thehustle.co/news/spritz-to-the-top-how-a-107-year-old-aperitif-became-a-900m-hit?ref=sharespective.com)** — Danny Jensen on Aperol, which Campari bought for about US$160 million in 2003 and now sells 8.8 million cases of a year. One orange liqueur is 26% of the group's sales. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[160-million-year-old proteins show surprising power against superbugs](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260925093155.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — Titas Sil and Matt Barber at the University of Oregon rebuilt antimicrobial peptides carried by the earliest placental mammals. Some killed drug-resistant bacteria better than the modern human version, and a single amino-acid change explains most of the difference. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[Still on its way to Cleveland](https://longreads.com/2026/09/22/family-road-trip-early-internet-90s/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Mark and Betsy Blondin drove three children 25,000 miles through 40 states over nine months in 1996, filing to a website from library dial-up along the way. It earned a Yahoo! Cool Site badge, which was then the internet's highest honour. | ### Wrapping up The change since Monday is the Federal Reserve. Traders now put a quarter-point rise at the 27-28 October meeting at about 70%, up from 64% on Friday. That makes Wednesday's August PCE reading in New York a bigger event than it looked yesterday. MongoDB's investor day goes ahead on Tuesday in New York, with an interim chief executive on stage. New Zealand's Treasury publishes its pre-election economic and fiscal update today, carrying fresh unemployment forecasts. USD/NZD is at 1.76 and the kiwi barely moved on Monday. USD/AUD is at 1.43, with the Aussie sitting near an eight-week low. Two days left in the quarter. 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.