Daily newsletter · Tue 13 Oct 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Tue 13 Oct 2026 |
 Catching Up Plus: a denser Chinese memory chip knocked 5.97% off SanDisk. |
Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday. The S&P 500 slipped 0.06% to 7,807.24 on Monday, after a winning week. The NASDAQ Composite fell 0.44% to 27,245.90 as chipmakers sold off, while the Dow added 0.38%.
Bond traders had Columbus Day off, and stocks barely missed them. Nine of the S&P 500's 11 sectors rose. The two that fell, technology and consumer discretionary, were heavy enough to tip the index into the red.
In company news, Bumble jumped 49.61% after reports that Ithaca Holdings is in talks to take the dating app private at a value of about US$1 billion. Elsewhere, Fair Isaac rose 10.8%, clawing back some of its fall since Washington opened mortgages to a cheaper rival credit score. Finally, Chipotle fell 3.77% after Starbucks said it is not buying the burrito chain.
Swipe right, apparently.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,807.24 ▼ 0.06% | | NASDAQ 27,245.90 ▼ 0.44% | | NZX 50 13,827.62 ▲ 0.57% |
| | ||||
ASX 200 8,783.20 ▲ 0.76% | | Meta US$742.96 ▲ 3.38% | | SanDisk US$1,487.33 ▼ 5.97% |
| BIG TECH |
Meta says its AI has caught up with the leaders, and its shares rose 3.38%
Meta Platforms rose 3.38% to US$742.96 on Monday. It released two new AI models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, and called them its most capable yet.
So what exactly is Meta claiming? Mark Zuckerberg told the Financial Times that Meta has reached the frontier and caught up with its competitors. The shares were up as much as 4.7% during the session.
Meta says Muse Wonder beats similar models from OpenAI and Anthropic on some technical benchmarks. It is built to do jobs on your behalf, such as reading a lease, sorting out an insurance claim or building an app.
Zuckerberg teased the launch on social media with a photo of a watermelon that Muse had ordered for him. Watermelon was the model's internal code name.
Catching up has been expensive. Meta expects to spend between US$130 billion and US$145 billion on capital projects this year, mostly on AI computing, and Zuckerberg told the FT the spending will keep growing.
Yeah, but a benchmark is a test the company chose to publish. I'd want to see what developers pay for once the novelty fades, because that is what turns US$145 billion of spending into revenue. |
| CHIPS |
A Chinese memory maker showed off a denser chip, and SanDisk fell 5.97%
SanDisk fell 5.97% to US$1,487.33 on Monday. Micron, America's biggest memory maker, lost 3.88% to US$989.04.
The trouble started at a conference in Shanghai. Over the weekend Cao Kanyu, president of ChangXin Memory Technologies, said CXMT will launch a new server memory product before the end of 2026. It uses a denser design that fits more memory cells onto each chip.
In today's mainstream memory chips, each cell takes up six small squares of silicon. CXMT's design needs four, so the same slice of silicon holds more memory.
That matters because memory has been extraordinarily profitable. Micron had risen 261% this year to Friday's close, as AI data centres bought everything the industry could make.
CXMT is already big. Its shares jumped 466% on their Shanghai debut in July, which made it the most valuable listed company in China.
The verdict CXMT has promised the chip by the end of 2026, and buyers will judge it on how many working chips it makes. Our read is that memory prices depend on tight supply, and Monday was the first time a Chinese rival looked able to loosen it. |
| ENERGY |
Brent crude rose to US$106.65 after weekend attacks on Saudi Arabia and tankers
Brent crude rose 1.84% to US$106.65 a barrel on Monday, its highest close in about two weeks. West Texas Intermediate, the American benchmark, gained 2.06% to US$93.74.
The weekend went badly in the Gulf. Houthi rebels from Yemen claimed strikes on Riyadh on Saturday, including the area around King Khalid International Airport. Two tankers were then attacked near Oman and in the Strait of Hormuz.
The stock market followed the oil price. Energy was the best of the S&P 500's 11 sectors, up 1.43%.
The calmer news came from Russia, and it did not last. Donald Trump said on Friday that Russia would supply more than 300,000 tonnes of diesel to world markets. On Sunday he announced an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.
By Monday Volodymyr Zelensky was saying Russia had already broken it, with fresh strikes on Ukrainian energy sites. The Kremlin said only that contacts were ongoing.
Worth watching the shipping lanes. Russian diesel helps at the margin, but Brent is priced off the Gulf, and the weekend showed that the route out of it is still under fire. |
Newsworthy numbers
| | |
118% how far the S&P 500 has risen since its bear-market low of 3,577.03 on 12 October 2022. The bull market turned four on Monday. | | 400,000 barrels how much OPEC now expects world oil demand to grow each day this year, down from the 1.4 million it forecast at the start of the year. |
| | ||
| | |
2.8 million installs of Meta's Muse app in its first 12 days, according to Apptopia, more than ChatGPT managed over the same stretch. | | US$4,190 roughly where gold finished on Monday, down about 0.6% on a day when war news pushed oil higher. Gold seems to have missed the memo. |
Worth a read
| |
01 | Surcharges putting people off contactless payments, survey suggests — Gareth Vaughan on a Payments NZ survey of 1,000 New Zealanders. Surcharges are now the main reason people avoid tapping, and fewer over-65s use it than in 2022. |
| |
02 | South Korea's AI chip giants are fighting for a bigger role in America's AI boom — Ananya Bhattacharya on Samsung and SK Hynix, which make 83% of the world's memory chips between them. Useful background to Monday's selloff. |
| |
03 | How AI could help unlock ancient secrets — Danny Jensen on Apollo, a language model trained on 600 million words of ancient Greek to help scholars read more than a million papyri nobody has deciphered. |
| |
04 | Neanderthals May Have Used Prehistoric Glue as an Ancient Antibiotic — Tjaark Siemssen's team made birch tar the Neanderthal way, in pits and against stones. Every sample held back the bacteria behind dangerous wound infections. |
| |
05 | He Went Out on an Epic Wilderness Adventure. Only His Dogs Came Back. — Blair Braverman's New York Times Magazine story on Steffen Skjottelvik, a 29-year-old Norwegian who set out across northern Canada with his malamutes. |
Wrapping up
The Federal Reserve's Beige Book, its district-by-district survey of the economy, lands at 7am Thursday in Auckland and 5am in Sydney. It arrives two weeks before the Fed meets on 27 and 28 October, when markets put the chance of a rise at about one in five.
ASML, the Dutch maker of chipmaking machines, reports at 6pm Wednesday in Auckland and 4pm in Sydney. After Monday's memory selloff, its orders from Chinese chipmakers are the line to watch. BlackRock and Charles Schwab report later in the week.
The kiwi and the Aussie both eased. USD/NZD rose to 1.79 and USD/AUD to 1.44.
Enjoy the lighter evenings, and see you tomorrow.