Daily newsletter · Wed 30 Sep 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Wed 30 Sep 2026 |
 Gloom And Bookings Plus: Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus gives 80 pages to what could go wrong. |
Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday. Americans have not felt this bad about the economy since 2014. The Conference Board's confidence index fell 6.7 points in September to 81.9, and economists had expected it to hold near 89.
Wall Street took that calmly. The S&P 500 slipped 0.17% to 7,670.84 and the NASDAQ Composite lost 0.09%, while oil handed back Monday's war premium. West Texas Intermediate fell about 3.5% to around US$89 a barrel.
In company news, Iovance Biotherapeutics jumped about 24% after lifting its full-year revenue guidance to between US$410 million and US$420 million. Elsewhere, Perella Weinberg rose about 11% on reports that Piper Sandler has held talks about combining with it. Finally, Netflix, one of our preferred stocks, added about 2% after Deutsche Bank upgraded it to buy.
Nobody told the buyers.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,670.84 ▼ 0.17% | | NASDAQ 26,797.54 ▼ 0.09% | | NZX 50 13,683.63 ▼ 1.06% |
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ASX 200 8,709.30 ▲ 0.34% | | Carnival US$25.11 ▲ 13.41% | | DraftKings US$19.63 ▼ 7.10% |
| ECONOMY |
Americans told a survey they feel terrible, then went and booked a cruise
The Conference Board's consumer confidence index landed at 81.9 in September, against the 89 or so economists expected. The present situation index dropped 7.9 points to 109.3, and views of current business conditions turned negative for the first time since September 2024.
The forward-looking half is the worrying one. The expectations index, which covers the next six months, dropped 5.9 points to 63.6. The Conference Board treats a reading under 80 as consistent with a recession within the year, and September was the third monthly fall in a row.
Tuesday's labour data did not help. Job openings fell by 256,000 in August to 7.079 million, against the 7.23 million economists expected. Hiring and quits barely moved.
Then Carnival reported. The cruise operator posted record third-quarter revenue and net income, lifted its full-year guidance, and said 2027 bookings and pricing are at record levels. The shares closed 13.41% higher at US$25.11.
The short version Americans have told surveyors they feel terrible for most of this year and then spent anyway. Our read is that the gap holds until the job market genuinely cracks, and August's openings number is the first honest sign that it might. |
| ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |
Anthropic told prospective investors its own models could threaten humanity
Reuters has obtained a draft prospectus for Anthropic's stock market listing. The American company behind the Claude assistant warns in it that its models could pose a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity. It is chasing a valuation above US$2 trillion.
Risk sections are usually boilerplate. About 80 of this document's 261 pages cover what could go wrong, against 48 on the business itself. The filing says models have resisted shutdown, concealed information, and behaved in a way resembling blackmail.
The finances are the other half of it. Revenue reached US$4.6 billion in 2025, more than ten times the year before, while the operating loss widened to US$8.06 billion from US$2.98 billion. Two customers were nearly a quarter of that revenue.
Anthropic held US$20.28 billion of cash at the end of December. A listing is expected some time after November's US midterm elections, and US$2 trillion would be double the roughly US$965 billion the company was valued at in May 2025.
Worth pondering a company asking for two trillion dollars while telling you its product might end the species is either unusually honest or unusually well lawyered. I'd read the 80 pages before the 48. |
| GAMBLING |
DraftKings fell to a three-year low as prediction markets kept taking its customers
DraftKings closed at US$19.63 on Tuesday, down 7.1% and its lowest since April 2023. Flutter Entertainment, which owns FanDuel, fell about 3% to US$74.39, the least it has been worth since March 2020.
So what is a prediction market? It is an exchange where people buy and sell contracts on an outcome, and the price of the contract is the odds. Kalshi and Polymarket run them in the United States under commodities rules rather than state gambling law.
Pricing is the problem for the incumbents. A sportsbook sets a line and keeps a margin, while an exchange matches two users and charges a fee. In an Outlier survey, 35% of people who had moved across named softer prices as the reason.
Flutter also lost a country. Brazil banned online betting last week, which shut Betfair and Betnacional and costs Flutter about US$70 million of 2026 revenue. India's crackdown is worth roughly US$250 million this year and US$310 million next.
What to watch the marketing line in DraftKings' next set of quarterly accounts. Competing on price with an exchange costs real money, and that is where it turns up first. |
Newsworthy numbers
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4.60% the Reserve Bank of Australia's cash rate after Tuesday's quarter-point rise, its fourth this year and the highest in nearly 15 years. The board pointed at global energy prices. | | NZ$6.8bn the operating deficit the Treasury now forecasts for 2026/27 in its pre-election update, down from the NZ$11.4 billion it pencilled in at May's Budget. |
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227,391 used vehicles CarMax sold in the quarter it reported on Tuesday, 13.8% more than a year earlier. Adjusted earnings came in at US$1.16 a share. | | 5.62% the 30-year US Treasury yield's high on Tuesday, its most since 2002 and a sixth straight daily rise. |
Worth a read
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01 | What an interest rate hike means for your mortgage, savings account and the Australian dollar — Hanan Dervisevic works through the plumbing. Each quarter-point adds about $91 a month to a $600,000 variable loan, and this year's four rises have taken roughly $4,320 out of that borrower's year. |
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02 | Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors — Chris Stokel-Walker on firms publishing hostile reviews of rivals that no human will ever read, written purely for the crawlers. One agency tested 50 buyer-style prompts and found competitor-planted content shaped 70% of the answers. |
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03 | The side hustle has entered its weird era — Line-sitters, professional bridesmaids, rented swimming pools and yards let out to dogs. One Los Angeles host reportedly makes US$22,000 a month from a pool, and 61% of side hustlers say life would be unaffordable without the money. |
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04 | Physicists discover time crystals can communicate across a semiconductor — Alex Greilich's team at TU Dortmund got separated time crystals to lock into a shared rhythm across 40 micrometres, more than a thousand times their own size, with spin-polarised electrons carrying the message. |
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05 | Archaeologists are reconstructing the 'invisible' technologies of the Stone Age — Benjamin Taub on rope, thread and twine, which rotted away and took most of prehistory's toolkit with them. Threading cattail fibres through a 35,000-year-old grooved tusk produced 16 feet of strong rope in ten minutes. |
Wrapping up
The change since Monday is what Friday's US jobs report has to carry. It was one item among several on the calendar; after Tuesday's confidence and job-openings misses it is the week's main event. ADP's private payrolls come first, on Wednesday in New York.
ISM manufacturing follows on Thursday, the first proper look at how American factories did in September. Conagra reports on Wednesday, and its fiscal first-quarter margins are the line to find. Australia's next Reserve Bank meeting runs 2 to 3 November.
USD/NZD is at 1.77, with the kiwi at its weakest since late June on a firm US dollar. USD/AUD is at 1.43, the Aussie having handed back its post-decision bounce once Michele Bullock played down the urgency of another rise.
That's the September quarter done. Back tomorrow.