Daily newsletter · Wed 4 Nov 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Wed 4 Nov 2026 |
 Chips Answer Back Plus: the Reserve Bank of Australia raised rates on Cup day, and three of its nine board members voted against it. |
Good morning. American shares steadied on Election Day. The S&P 500 rose 0.36% and the NASDAQ Composite 0.83%, both snapping a three-day losing run, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.38%.
Chipmakers did the work. The group was flattened on Friday by Intel's forecast and sold off again on Monday. AMD climbed 3.65% before its own results landed after the closing bell.
In other company news, Sysco fell 9.33% after quarterly sales missed forecasts. Elsewhere, Fiserv jumped 12.46% because its quarterly earnings beat expectations and it lifted its cost-savings target. Finally, Zebra Technologies fell almost 9% as its profit forecast for next year came in below what analysts expected.
Order restored, for now.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,568.92 ▲ 0.36% | | NASDAQ 25,372.01 ▲ 0.83% | | NZX 50 13,720.26 ▲ 0.16% |
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ASX 200 8,886.80 ▲ 0.34% | | AMD US$483.90 ▲ 3.65% | | Shopify US$142.57 ▼ 8.74% |
| CHIPS |
AMD's data centre sales nearly doubled, and it has guided to US$17 billion for this quarter
AMD reported revenue of US$13.38 billion for the September quarter, up 45% on a year earlier and above the top of its own guidance. Adjusted earnings came in at US$2.09 a share, up 74%, against the US$1.95 analysts expected.
So was it the PC chips? No. The data centre division sold US$8.55 billion of chips, up 97%, while the client business behind PC processors grew 7%, gaming fell 40% and embedded grew 29%. Data centre revenue is now more than twice client and gaming put together.
The forecast did more work than the quarter. AMD guided to about US$17 billion of revenue for the December quarter, give or take 3%. That is roughly 66% growth on a year earlier, and about a quarter more than it has just booked.
The shares closed at US$483.90 on Tuesday, up 3.65%, and added about 7% more in after-hours trading. They had fallen 7.52% on Monday, a day the whole chip sector sold off.
The tell gaming is shrinking and PC chips are barely growing, so nearly all of AMD's growth now comes from one division selling to a short list of buyers. Our read is that the question has shifted from whether AI demand is real to how long those buyers keep writing cheques. |
| ECONOMY |
The Reserve Bank of Australia raised rates to a level Australians have not seen since 2008
The Reserve Bank of Australia lifted its cash rate by a quarter point to 4.85% on Tuesday afternoon in Sydney. It is the fifth rise this year and the highest the rate has been since November 2008.
Three of the nine board members voted against it. Six wanted the rise and three wanted to hold at 4.60%. The board also dropped the warning it had been carrying that further rises might be needed.
Inflation is the reason given. The bank says price pressures are broad-based, and expects inflation to stay above 3% for the coming year. It does not see inflation back at the top of its 2% to 3% target band until late 2027.
Borrowers pay for this within weeks. The rise takes the average variable rate on an owner-occupier home loan to about 6.74%, and it lands with house prices already falling and unemployment already rising.
Markets latched onto the missing warning. The ASX 200 closed 0.34% higher at 8,886.80, with property trusts leading, and the Australian dollar fell to a two-week low against the US dollar.
Our view the three dissenters matter more than the quarter point. The Aussie fell on the day its central bank raised rates, which says the market heard an ending rather than a continuation. I'd want to see December-quarter inflation before agreeing with it. |
| E-COMMERCE |
Shopify grew revenue 32% and lost 8.74%, because two numbers came in slightly short
Shopify shares closed at US$142.57 on Tuesday, down 8.74%, after gapping down to open at US$136.43. The company had reported revenue of US$3.74 billion for the September quarter, up 32%, and earnings of 49 US cents a share against the 33 cents analysts expected.
The misses were small. Gross merchandise volume, the total value of goods sold through Shopify's merchants, came in at US$119.1 billion against the US$120.1 billion expected. Subscription revenue was US$836 million against about US$850 million.
Neither gap reaches 2%. It was Shopify's first quarterly revenue miss since 2022. Merchants still put 30% more through the checkout than a year ago, measured at steady exchange rates.
Cash went the other way. Free cash flow was US$816 million, a 22% margin on revenue against 18% a year earlier. Net income reached US$462 million, up from US$264 million.
The other side Shopify has guided to another quarter of low-thirties revenue growth, so nothing in the numbers says the business has turned. What changed on Tuesday is that it met its own forecast instead of beating it, and years of beating it is what the share price had assumed. |
Newsworthy numbers
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298% how much Super Micro Computer's revenue grew in the quarter to September, to US$19.9 billion from US$5 billion. Analysts had expected US$16.3 billion. | | 54 million early ballots cast in the US midterms before polls opened on Tuesday, about nine million more than in 2022. |
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A$10.2m the prize pool for Tuesday's Melbourne Cup. Ciaron Maher trained the first three horses home, which no trainer had managed in the race's 166 years. | | 4.93% the US 10-year Treasury yield on Tuesday, four basis points higher and back within a whisker of 5%. Monday's oil crash was supposed to help. |
Worth a read
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01 | RBA hikes cash rate to 4.85 per cent with Aussies forking out an extra $7000 on mortgage repayments — Sophie Venz adds up what this year's five rises have done to an A$800,000 mortgage: A$607 a month, or about A$7,248 over the year. |
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02 | CrowdStrike to shell out nearly $500M for 2 AI security startups as the market for securing agents takes off — Ram Iyer on CrowdStrike paying US$400 million for Fiddler AI and US$95 million for Dreadnode. Both exist to watch what a company's AI agents are actually doing. |
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03 | The ISS is retiring — this startup wants its spot — Bill Meincke on Axiom Space, which has raised more than US$525 million to build a commercial replacement for the International Space Station before it comes down around 2030. |
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04 | Satellite Imagery Reveals a 2,600 Year-Old Complex Buried Beneath an Ancient City in Egypt — Passant Rabie on a structure 128 metres by 62 metres found under the sacred city of Buto, using satellite radar and electrical currents run through the ground. |
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05 | Melbourne Cup: Point of Law in comeback win to take out A$4.5m — Point of Law ran down a long-clear Royal Supremacy to beat Zahrann by three and three-quarter lengths, and Ethan Brown has his first Cup. |
Wrapping up
Futures have the odds of a December rise from the Federal Reserve at about 72% this morning, from 76% on Monday. US weekly jobless claims arrive at 2.30am Friday in Auckland and 12.30am in Sydney.
Cloudflare reports after Thursday's close in New York, where the consensus is revenue of about US$737 million. Atlassian, founded in Sydney, reports at the same time. ConocoPhillips goes before Thursday's open, and what it says about US$96 oil matters more than the quarter behind it.
USD/NZD sat at 1.78 on Tuesday and USD/AUD edged up to 1.44.
Cup run, election Saturday, and a Wednesday in between.