Daily newsletter · Fri 2 Oct 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Fri 2 Oct 2026 |
 Billable Hours Survive Plus: Nike's China sales fell 22%, and its profit outlook missed by a mile. |
Good morning, and welcome to Friday. The American bond market gave stocks a fright on Thursday morning and then let them go. The 10-year Treasury yield touched 5.34%, its highest since 2002, and the S&P 500 was down 0.42% by 11am in New York.
The yield eased to about 5.24% by the close, and the S&P 500 finished 0.19% higher. Accenture had the day's best story, a result that eased a year of fears about AI. Nike's came after the bell and went down less well.
In company news, Mattel jumped 18.80% after The Wall Street Journal reported that Authentic Brands Group has discussed a bid worth more than US$20 a share. Elsewhere, Synopsys rose 12.78% after signing deals with OpenAI and Amazon Web Services and lifting its 2027 forecasts. Finally, Danaher fell about 4.5% as Julie Sawyer Montgomery took over from Rainer Blair as chief executive.
Saved by the bond market.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,666.45 ▲ 0.19% | | NASDAQ 26,871.60 ▲ 0.04% | | NZX 50 13,810.51 ▼ 0.17% |
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ASX 200 8,614.40 ▼ 1.99% | | Accenture US$212.30 ▲ 15.78% | | Corteva US$12.57 ▼ 83.81% |
| CONSULTING |
Accenture jumped 15.78% after its order book answered the AI question
Accenture closed at US$212.30 on Thursday, up 15.78%, and was more than 20% higher at one point. Fourth-quarter revenue was US$18.7 billion, up 6%, against the US$18.05 billion analysts expected.
Accenture sells people's time, and AI was supposed to need less of it. About 814,000 people work there, building and running computer systems for big companies. The fear all year has been that AI tools would do much of that work, and clients would pay for fewer hours.
The order book says clients are still signing. Accenture booked a record US$84.5 billion of new work over the year. The fourth quarter alone brought 141 bookings worth US$100 million or more each.
The mix is less comfortable. Outsourcing, where Accenture runs a client's systems for years at a time, made up US$12.8 billion of the quarter's US$22.2 billion in bookings. New consulting projects booked only as much work as they billed.
The other side Accenture expects revenue to grow 3% to 6% in local currencies next year, no faster than the 5% it managed this year. Our read is that Thursday took the worst fear out of the price. The next number to watch is consulting, where bookings need to outrun revenue again, as they did over the full year. |
| SPORTSWEAR |
Nike's China sales fell 22% and its outlook undershot even the bears
Nike reported after Thursday's close in New York. First-quarter revenue fell 4% to US$11.2 billion, a little short of the US$11.3 billion analysts expected. Earnings of 48 US cents a share beat the 44 cents forecast.
Monday's edition named Greater China as the line to watch, and it got worse. Revenue there fell 22% to US$1.18 billion. In the quarter Nike reported in June, it had fallen 17%.
Elsewhere the news was better. North America grew 2%, inventory fell 3% to US$7.8 billion, and gross margin rose to 42.8% from 42.2%. Leaner stock means less discounting to clear it.
The outlook did the damage. Nike now expects revenue to fall by a high-single-digit percentage this financial year, with adjusted earnings of US$1.15 to US$1.35 a share. Analysts had about US$1.66.
Even Bank of America, which downgraded Nike last Friday, had pencilled in US$1.43. The shares closed the regular session 0.71% lower at US$35.15, then fell about 5% in after-hours trading.
Next up the December quarter. Margins and inventory are moving the right way, and China is moving the wrong way faster. I'd want to see the China decline narrow before giving the rest much weight. |
| AGRICULTURE |
Corteva fell 84% in a day and its shareholders finished roughly where they started
Corteva closed at US$12.57 on Thursday, down 83.81% from Wednesday's US$77.65. The American farm company had just handed its seed business to shareholders as a separate listed company called Vylor.
So where did the money go? Every Corteva shareholder on the register on 24 September received one Vylor share for each Corteva share. Vylor opened on the New York Stock Exchange at US$66 and traded between US$65 and US$75 all day.
Put one of each together and a holder ended Thursday with about what a single Corteva share was worth on Wednesday, or a little more. Corteva's market value shrank by more than US$42 billion, and most of it turned up again under Vylor's ticker.
Vylor takes the Pioneer seed brand and the genetics business. Corteva keeps crop protection, the chemicals farmers spray on their fields, and the legal history of the DuPont and Dow businesses it was split from in 2019.
That history is the fight. States led by California argue the split is a fraudulent transfer, meant to put valuable assets beyond the reach of claims over PFAS, the "forever chemicals". A federal court refused for a second time on Wednesday to block it.
The loose end the lawsuit carries on now that the split is done. A finding that the transfer was fraudulent could let claimants reach the seed business after all. |
Newsworthy numbers
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77.9 the ISM's index of prices paid by American factories in September, up from 71.1 in August. Economists had expected about 72. | | 197,000 Americans filing new jobless claims in the week to 26 September, the fourth weekly fall in a row and below the 200,000 economists expected. |
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97% the share of Australian capital-city suburbs where home values fell over the three months to September, on Cotality's figures. National values are now 5.2% below their March peak. | | 94.8% the share of votes cast at Heartland's special meeting in favour of its NZ$620 million takeover of TSB. The Reserve Bank still has to approve the deal. |
Worth a read
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01 | Australian housing values down for sixth straight month in September — Cotality's monthly index fell 1.1% in September. Sydney is now 8.6% below its February peak, and the typical home is taking 39 days to sell, up from 23 a year ago. |
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02 | Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease chips, in latest circular investing deal — Michael B. Kelley and Daniel Howley on a chip designer lending a customer the money to rent its chips. Nvidia and AMD have done versions of the same deal with OpenAI and Anthropic. |
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03 | One brewery's mission to disrupt Oktoberfest's "cartel" — Only six Munich breweries have poured at the festival for more than a century. Giesinger Bräu, founded in 2006, has 21,000 of the 35,000 signatures it needs to force a citywide vote. |
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04 | A glimpse of the solar system's origins: Striking details on the molecules inside a meteorite — The Murchison meteorite fell in Victoria in 1969. A 21-tesla mass spectrometer in Florida found tens of thousands of carbon-based molecular formulas inside it, and only a small fraction match a meteorite that landed in Costa Rica in 2019. |
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05 | Obituary: Dame Esther Rantzen dies at 86 — She presented That's Life! for 21 years, used it to found Childline in 1986, and spent her final years campaigning for assisted dying after a stage-four lung cancer diagnosis in 2018. |
Wrapping up
The Federal Reserve publishes the minutes of its September meeting on Wednesday in Washington, at 7am Thursday in Auckland and 5am in Sydney. Closer to home, NZIER's quarterly business survey lands at 10am Tuesday in Auckland, 8am in Sydney.
Tesla publishes third-quarter deliveries on Friday in New York, against a company-compiled consensus of 461,974 cars, about 7% fewer than a year ago. PepsiCo opens results season on Thursday 8 October, and its snack volumes since February's chip price cuts are the line to find.
USD/NZD is at 1.78, the kiwi's weakest since November 2025, as rising American yields kept money flowing to the US dollar. USD/AUD is at 1.44.
Sydney puts its clocks forward and takes a long weekend. Back tomorrow.