> ## 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. # Rescued By Friday - URL: https://www.sharespective.com/sharespective-2026-10-05/ - Published: 2026-10-04T21:15:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-04T21:15:00.000Z - Description: Paramount and Warner Bros. become one company called Skydance on Tuesday. - 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 newsletterMon 5 Oct 2026 | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------ | | ![Today's edition](https://storage.ghost.io/c/02/71/0271df32-cec6-421f-9f13-b06ab90e54c1/content/images/2026/08/kicker-1.png)Rescued By Friday**Plus:** Paramount and Warner Bros. become one company called Skydance on Tuesday. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | **Good morning.** The bond market kept Wall Street on the back foot for most of last week, and a weak jobs report on Friday got it back up. The S&P 500 finished the week 0.27% lower at 7,722.72, and the NASDAQ Composite gained 0.45%. The 10-year Treasury yield rose to 5.28% from 5.18%, and the Dow lost 1.3%. OPEC+ held its November output targets steady on Sunday. Futures now put an October Fed rise at about 17%, so the market goes into tonight cheering for a slower economy. In company news, Lumentum rose 15.3% over the week after Bernstein started covering the laser maker with an outperform rating. Elsewhere, Hewlett Packard Enterprise gained 10.2% on a US$1.2 billion order for AI server racks and a higher long-term outlook. Finally, Jabil fell 10% on Wednesday because its fiscal 2027 margin forecast disappointed, even though the quarter beat. Bonds three, stocks two. ### Market snapshot | S&P 5007,722.72**▼ 0.27%** | ​ | NASDAQ27,190.86**▲ 0.45%** | ​ | NZX 5013,680.49**▼ 0.95%** | | -------------------------- | - | -------------------------- | - | -------------------------- | | ​ | | | | | | ASX 2008,682.10**▲ 0.20%** | ​ | USD/NZD1.78**▲ 0.66%** | ​ | USD/AUD1.44**▲ 0.99%** | Levels are Friday 2 October's closes, and the change column is the move over the week from Friday 25 September's close. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are local closes; the currencies are New York closes. | ​ | CREDIT | | - | ------ | ## Washington gave mortgage lenders a cheaper credit score, and FICO lost a quarter of its value Fair Isaac, the company behind the FICO credit score, fell 26.52% to US$617.87 last Tuesday. That was its worst day since 1989, and the shares finished the week 23.4% lower at US$661.25. **The change sounds technical, and it reaches the core of the business.** On Monday, Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will price mortgages off one grid. VantageScore, a cheaper rival built by the credit bureaus, joins FICO Classic on it. Until now a VantageScore had to be 20 points higher than a FICO score to earn the same loan price. That gap gave lenders a cost reason to stay with FICO, even after it doubled its mortgage price to about US$10 a score this year. The rival costs a tenth of that. TransUnion will keep VantageScore 4.0 at 99 US cents a score until December 2028\. Rocket Mortgage, the country's largest home lender by volume, will make it the default on eligible loans from this quarter. FICO bounced 11.69% on Thursday. Mortgage bonds still require a FICO score, Yahoo Finance points out, so many lenders may keep paying for both. | Worth ponderinghow many lenders follow Rocket. I'd wait for a second big name to switch its default before judging how much of FICO's mortgage business is really at risk. | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | MEDIA | | - | ----- | ## Paramount and Warner Bros. become one company called Skydance on Tuesday Paramount Skydance expects to complete its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday in New York. Warner shareholders get US$31 a share in cash, in a deal worth about US$111 billion including debt. **The last obstacle was 12 states, and a federal judge cleared it on Wednesday.** Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a settlement with their attorneys general, who had sued over the risk of fewer films and higher prices. Most of the settlement is about cinemas. The combined company must release at least 30 films a year for two years, then 32 a year for three more. Each one plays in cinemas for at least 45 days and stays off subscription streaming for 90. David Ellison stays chairman and chief executive, and announced the new name, Skydance, on X. Ynon Kreiz, who left Mattel last week, becomes co-chief executive. At Mattel, Kreiz oversaw Barbie, still Warner Bros. Pictures' highest-grossing film. HBO Max and Paramount+ have a little over 200 million subscribers between them. | The test aheadthe streaming plan. The cinema promises lock in five years of film spending, so the money has to come from those subscribers paying more. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ​ | CHIPS | | - | ----- | ## AMD is paying US$8.2 billion for a startup that builds 3D worlds for AI AMD agreed last Monday to buy World Labs, the San Francisco startup co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, for about US$8.2 billion in AMD shares. Only its roughly US$50 billion purchase of Xilinx in 2022 was bigger. **So what does World Labs make?** Its models turn text, images and video into interactive 3D environments, including simulations a robot can learn in. Its first product, Marble, launched late last year, and in February it raised US$1 billion from investors including AMD. Li ran Stanford's artificial intelligence lab and led ImageNet, the labelled photo database behind much of the early image-recognition research. She becomes AMD's chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su. Nvidia, one of our preferred stocks, made a similar move in September, agreeing to buy Hugging Face for US$12.93 billion. Both chipmakers are buying businesses that build or host AI models, which tells them sooner what their chips will need to run. AMD closed Friday at US$633.91, up 0.52% on the week and worth about US$1 trillion. The deal adds less than 1% to its share count. | The bigger pictureour read is that AMD has bought early warning. It now hears what the next AI models will need from the people building them. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ### Newsworthy numbers | ​ | ​ | ​ | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | - | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 1,195vehicles separating Ford from Hyundai, Kia and Genesis combined in American sales for the September quarter. Ford kept third place even though its sales fell 6.6%. | ​ | NZ$810,141New Zealand's median home value on Cotality's index after a 0.1% rise in September, the first after five monthly falls. Auckland is still 22.6% below its peak. | | ​ | | | | ​ | ​ | ​ | | US$1,600the average saving at closing for Rocket Mortgage borrowers who did better on VantageScore, in tests on 1.4 million credit reports. | ​ | 4Falcon boosters SpaceX landed on 1 October, the first time it has brought back four in a single day. | ### Worth a read | ​ | | | -- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 01 | **[Here's the average Australian superannuation balance at 57 and 67](https://www.fool.com.au/2026/10/03/heres-the-average-australian-superannuation-balance-at-57-and-67/?ref=sharespective.com)** — Australians aged 55 to 59 hold $243,300 in super on average. ASFA reckons a single homeowner needs about $630,000 for a comfortable retirement. | | ​ | | | 02 | **[Delta Air Lines Stock Forecast: Strong Demand Faces a Renewed Fuel-Cost Test](https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/262197715-delta-air-lines-dal-stock-forecast-october-4-2026?ref=sharespective.com)** — Arslan Ali previews Friday's result. Delta planned on jet fuel at about US$3.15 a gallon, which looks low with Brent above US$100. | | ​ | | | 03 | **[How the founder behind the latest Girl Scout Cookie jolted an industry](https://thehustle.co/news/how-the-founder-behind-the-latest-girl-scout-cookie-jolted-an-industry?ref=sharespective.com)** — Denise Woodward started Partake Foods from her SUV and was turned down by investors 86 times. Her allergen-free cookie joins the Girl Scouts' range in January 2027. | | ​ | | | 04 | **[97-million-year-old fossils reveal the earliest known animal 'GPS'](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260930020329.htm?ref=sharespective.com)** — Rich Harrison's Cambridge team found magnetic particles in North Atlantic seabed that sense both the direction and strength of Earth's field. Eels are one suspect. | | ​ | | | 05 | **[Daly Cherry-Evans field goal wins Roosters premiership over Knights](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-04/nrl-grand-final-live-nrlw-roosters-knights-broncos/107219724?ref=sharespective.com)** — Cherry-Evans, 37, kicked the winner in a 19-18 game, his last in the NRL, 15 years after his first premiership with Manly. | ### Wrapping up The week left the S&P 500 within 1% of its record. Wednesday's Fed minutes, at 7​am Thursday in Auckland and 5​am in Sydney, are the main event. ISM services, a 10-year bond auction and Michigan's consumer survey fill out the US week. Results season starts small. Constellation Brands reports after Tuesday's US close, PepsiCo before Thursday's open and Delta Air Lines on Friday. In New Zealand, NZIER's quarterly business survey lands at 10​am Tuesday. Australia's diary is light. The kiwi fell for a sixth straight week, its longest losing run since early 2025, and USD/NZD rose to 1.78\. Treasury yields above 5% keep drawing money to the US dollar. USD/AUD rose to 1.44 after August inflation figures cut the odds of another Reserve Bank rise. ### The week ahead - **Tue 3​am NZ · 1​am Sydney** — ISM services index for September; it read 55.4 in August. - **Tue 10​am NZ · 8​am Sydney** — NZIER's Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion for the September quarter. - **Wed (Tuesday after the US close)** — Constellation Brands' second-quarter result; beer volumes are the line to watch. - **Thu 6​am NZ · 4​am Sydney** — US 10-year Treasury note auction, with the yield near 5.3%. - **Thu 7​am NZ · 5​am Sydney** — Minutes of the Fed's September meeting, which lifted rates to 3.75–4.00%; futures price an October rise at about 17%. - **Thu 11​pm NZ · 9​pm Sydney** — PepsiCo's third-quarter result; analysts expect US$2.30 a share on about US$24.97 billion of revenue. - **Fri (late, before the US open)** — Delta Air Lines' September-quarter result, after guidance for between US$2.00 and US$2.50 a share. - **Sat 3​am NZ · 1​am Sydney** — University of Michigan's preliminary consumer sentiment reading for October. One point in it on Sunday night. Commiserations, Newcastle, and 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.