Daily newsletter · Sat 31 Oct 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Sat 31 Oct 2026 |
 Chips Down Plus: Exxon Mobil and Chevron touched record highs as refining profits soared. |
Good morning. US shares finished October with a heavy Friday. The S&P 500 fell 1.82% and the NASDAQ Composite 2.86%. That left the NASDAQ down more than 5% for the month, its worst since March 2025.
Intel did most of the damage, falling 28.58% after a weak forecast and dragging other chipmakers down with it. Exxon Mobil and Chevron went the other way, to record highs. The Dow, which leans on older and duller businesses, still finished October up 1.5%.
In other company news, Reddit fell 29.22%, its worst day since listing in 2024, after warning that falling traffic from Google search could shrink its daily users. Elsewhere, CareDx jumped 22.22% because its September-quarter revenue rose 39% and it raised its full-year forecast. Finally, Roblox fell 18.05% after its daily users dropped 9% to 138 million.
More trick than treat.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,580.07 ▼ 1.82% | | NASDAQ 25,437.00 ▼ 2.86% | | NZX 50 13,797.00 ▲ 0.63% |
| | ||||
ASX 200 8,908.10 ▲ 0.18% | | Intel US$65.76 ▼ 28.58% | | Exxon US$187.25 ▲ 2.16% |
| TECHNOLOGY |
Intel had its worst day since 1974 after a weak forecast for the December quarter
Intel shares closed at US$65.76 on Friday, the day after its results. The fall wiped close to US$150 billion off the company's value, and the stock has not had a worse day since July 1974.
The trouble is the next three months. Intel expects December-quarter revenue of US$15 billion to US$16 billion, against about US$17 billion expected. It forecast adjusted earnings of 25 cents a share, where analysts had pencilled in 43 cents.
PCs are the weak spot. Memory chips have become expensive because AI data centres are buying so many, and that pushes up the price of a laptop. Seaport Research's Jay Goldberg said Intel is making too many chips for the worst PC market in 15 years, and too few for AI servers.
An accident made it worse. An explosion this month at Intel's factory in Kiryat Gat, Israel, will cost about US$300 million of revenue in the December quarter, the company says.
The US government bought a 9.9% stake in Intel in August 2025. That stake lost more than US$10 billion on paper on Friday.
Our read the shares were up about 150% for the year going into Thursday's results, and are still up more than 70%. A lot of hope came out of the price on Friday. Chief executive Lip-Bu Tan says rebuilding Intel will take years, and I'd judge it on what the factories deliver over that time. |
| ENERGY |
Exxon Mobil and Chevron touched record highs as refining profits soared
Exxon Mobil rose 2.16% to US$187.25 on Friday, and Chevron gained 1.75% to US$235.52. Both touched record highs after their September-quarter results. The S&P 500's energy sector set a record as well.
So where did the extra money come from? Mostly from turning crude oil into diesel and petrol. Exxon's refining business earned a record US$9.05 billion, about five times what it made a year earlier.
Chevron's US refineries processed a record 1.09 million barrels of crude a day. Exxon ran its Gulf Coast refineries at full capacity.
War is why refining pays so well right now. Attacks on shipping around the Strait of Hormuz and drone strikes on refineries in Russia and the Middle East have taken fuel out of the market. US diesel averaged about US$6.30 a gallon in October, according to AAA.
Overall profit more than doubled at Exxon, to US$15.4 billion, and nearly tripled at Chevron, to US$9.9 billion. Exxon also announced a US$20 billion share buyback for next year.
What to watch the oil wells are earning less. Exxon's upstream profit fell to US$7.31 billion from US$9.19 billion in the June quarter, because crude was cheaper. Refining margins depend on the disruptions lasting, so the December quarter will show how much of this one was the war. |
| CRYPTO |
Hackers took US$6.3 billion from Binance, the biggest crypto theft on record
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, was hacked late on Thursday, and US$6.3 billion went missing. The previous record was the US$1.5 billion taken from the exchange Bybit in February 2025.
The money left in about 20 minutes. The attackers emptied Binance wallets on 10 blockchains into wallets of their own. Co-chief executive Richard Teng said a hacked laptop belonging to a Binance engineer may have been the way in, and Binance later found other points of entry.
Two US blockchain analysis firms, TRM Labs and Chainalysis, blamed TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking unit. Binance says it has not attributed the attack to anyone.
About US$3 billion has been frozen since, more than US$2.3 billion of it by the stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle. Binance has set aside US$6.34 billion of its own money to repay customers, and suspended withdrawals in the meantime.
Bitcoin fell to a six-week low of about US$76,400. Coinbase, the biggest US exchange, lost 10.62%, after its own quarterly revenue fell about a third from a year earlier.
The open question Binance can cover the loss from its own funds, so customers should get their money back. The test comes when withdrawals reopen, which Binance expects within about 45 hours, and customers decide whether to leave their money there. |
Newsworthy numbers
| | |
US$13.5 billion what Americans are expected to spend on Halloween this year, according to the National Retail Federation. Candy accounts for US$4.1 billion of it. | | NZ$9.75 Fonterra's new midpoint forecast for this season's milk price, per kilogram of milk solids, up from NZ$9.50 on stronger demand for milk powder. |
| | ||
| | |
3.1% how much US wages and salaries rose in the year to September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Inflation ran at 3.6% over the same year. | | 3.5% gold's fall on Friday, which took it below US$3,900 an ounce and to its lowest in 13 months. |
Worth a read
| |
01 | Tech stocks end long-time top KiwiSaver performer's golden run — Susan Edmunds on Morningstar's latest survey. Simplicity's growth fund now leads on 10-year returns at 9.9% a year, and Milford's light holding in Nvidia is part of why it slipped. |
| |
02 | Australian passengers in financial limbo after Odyssey cruise ship runs out of money — Kristy Sexton-McGrath on a ship people paid to live on, which put more than 200 of them ashore in Cambodia. Fuel had climbed from US$1,800 a cabin a month to as much as US$8,000. |
| |
03 | These startups want to suck your blood (and data) — Danny Jensen on direct-to-consumer blood testing, a US$4.7 billion market last year, and what happens to your health data afterwards. |
| |
04 | The Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs. Why Did Crocodiles Survive? — UCL researchers led by Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza studied more than 7,000 fossils. Crocodiles' taste for warmth seems to have put the survivors near the equator, where the climate held up best. |
| |
05 | The Origins of Halloween — Matthew Wills on what anthropologists make of the holiday, including a study that found the scare over poisoned Halloween candy was greatly exaggerated. |
Wrapping up
Traders trimmed their odds of a December Fed rise on Friday, to below 80% from 84.6% on Thursday. St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem said further rises will be needed soon. The October US jobs report lands at 2.30am next Saturday in Auckland, 12.30am in Sydney.
AMD reports after Tuesday's close in New York, which is Wednesday morning here. After Intel's warning, its PC chip sales are the line to watch. Stats NZ publishes September-quarter unemployment figures on Wednesday 4 November.
The kiwi and the Aussie barely moved on Friday, with USD/NZD at 1.78 and USD/AUD at 1.42.
Happy Halloween. Mind the trick-or-treaters, and see you on Monday.