Daily newsletter · Sat 7 Nov 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Sat 7 Nov 2026 |
 Too Many Jobs Plus: Tesla is winding down the Cybertruck after about 70,000 of them. |
Good morning. American shares took back a sliver of Thursday's rout. The NASDAQ Composite rose 1.09% on Friday and the S&P 500 added 0.31%. Both lost ground over the week, and for the S&P it was the worst one since June.
The October jobs report arrived before the open and was far too strong for the bond market's liking. Employers added 165,000 jobs against the 65,000 economists expected, yields rose, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 0.46% lower.
In company news, AMD rose 11.04% to US$449.04 as the chipmakers clawed back part of Thursday's hiding. Elsewhere, DraftKings fell 21.3% because its quarterly loss came in wider than expected and sportsbook revenue missed. Finally, Atlassian dropped 16.15% after the Sydney-founded software company guided revenue from its self-hosted customers down by between 14% and 16%.
Friday fixed almost nothing.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,376.86 ▲ 0.31% | | NASDAQ 24,579.42 ▲ 1.09% | | NZX 50 13,998.50 ▼ 0.66% |
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ASX 200 9,020.80 ▼ 0.49% | | Cloudflare US$268.75 ▲ 9.91% | | Tesla US$358.22 ▲ 4.23% |
| ECONOMY |
America added 165,000 jobs in October, and the bond market heard a December rate rise
Nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000 in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. Economists had expected about 65,000. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1% from 4.2%, with 7.1 million Americans counted as out of work.
The revisions did as much work as the headline. August and September were revised up by a combined 84,000. September's figure read 29,000 when it was published, and it no longer looks like the start of a stall.
Pay rose slowly. Average hourly earnings grew 0.4% over the month and 3.1% over the year. Health care and social assistance employers took on about 55,000 people, the most in six months.
Bond markets moved first. The two-year Treasury yield, which tracks rate expectations most closely, rose to 4.52%. Futures now put the odds of a quarter-point Federal Reserve rise in December at about 78%, from 70% before the figures landed.
The verdict inflation is the last thing standing in the way. October consumer prices arrive on Tuesday in Washington, and I'd want to see the core reading before treating next month's rise as settled. |
| AUTOS |
Tesla is winding down the Cybertruck three years after the first one was delivered
Elon Musk said on Friday that Tesla will stop building the Cybertruck at its Austin plant around the middle of 2027. The shares rose 4.23% to US$358.22.
So why stop making the most recognisable vehicle Tesla builds? It did not sell. The line at Gigafactory Texas was laid out for 250,000 trucks a year and has been turning out roughly 30,000. About 70,000 have gone to customers in three years.
American sales went backwards. Kelley Blue Book counted 20,237 Cybertrucks sold in the United States last year, down from 38,965 the year before. The cheapest dual-motor version still starts at US$74,990.
Musk says the floor space goes to the Cybercab, the driverless taxi at the centre of Tesla's robotaxi plans. Electrek notes that Gigafactory Texas runs at about a quarter of capacity, with more than 10 million square feet spare.
Boiled down the Cybercab inherits the floor space and the expectations. Our read is that Tesla has spent three years proving it can build something extraordinary that very few people want, and the taxi replacing it has a much lower bar to clear. |
| CLOUD COMPUTING |
Cloudflare grew revenue 39%, its fastest in nearly four years
Cloudflare reported revenue of US$782.5 million for the September quarter, up 39% on a year earlier. Analysts had expected about US$736.8 million. The shares rose 9.91% to US$268.75 on Friday.
That is the fastest Cloudflare has grown in nearly four years. Adjusted earnings came in at 38 US cents a share against the 34 cents expected. Billings, which count what customers have agreed to pay, rose 35.5% to US$846.2 million.
The forecast did more than the quarter. Cloudflare guided December-quarter revenue to about US$845.5 million, against the US$795.9 million analysts had pencilled in. Full-year adjusted earnings guidance went to US$1.35 a share, the third raise this year.
Cash improved with it. Free cash flow reached 10.5% of revenue, up from 8.1% a year earlier, and annualised revenue passed US$3 billion. The company still records an operating loss once share-based pay is counted in full.
Food for thought Cloudflare sells the delivery and security layer that sits in front of AI services, so its growth is bolted to the same buildout the market spent Thursday repricing. One good quarter says nothing about what happens if data centre orders slow. |
Newsworthy numbers
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51.0 the University of Michigan's early November read on consumer sentiment, up from 48.0 and the highest since August. Economists had expected no improvement, and one-year inflation expectations eased to 4.3% from 4.7%. | | US$25bn the share buyback Lam Research's board approved on Thursday, one of the largest the chip equipment industry has seen. The shares rose 8.23% on Friday. |
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A$100m the capital overlay the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority put on Macquarie Group on Friday, after finding it had miscalculated the capital behind its non-bank businesses since 2019. Macquarie reported a half-year profit of A$2.5 billion the same morning. | | US$1.3bn what AST SpaceMobile agreed to pay Firefly Aerospace for 36 rocket engines, three years of engineering help and a perpetual licence to build the engines itself. That last part took some thinking about. |
Worth a read
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01 | How exposed is your KiwiSaver to market wobbles? — Susan Edmunds on what a US tech selloff does to a growth fund. Milford's Aggressive fund has about 26% of its top ten holdings in technology, Kernel's about 20%. |
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02 | Backlash to AI data centres reaches the ballot boxes — Pascale Davies on the local politics behind Thursday's selling. Community opposition disrupted 45 data centre projects in the second half of this year. |
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03 | The startup sending an extra set of hands to busy families — Bill Meincke on Rosie, a Seattle membership service that sends vetted helpers to do the laundry and the school run. It has raised US$7 million in two rounds. |
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04 | Major trial challenges how doctors decide who really needs statins — nearly 5,800 adults were split between the standard risk calculator and a heart scan. Both produced the same 2.7% rate of cardiac events, but the scan group took their pills far more reliably. |
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05 | Swift spacecraft fell back to Earth in a fiery blaze — NASA's gamma-ray burst hunter re-entered over northern Sumatra on 4 November, 22 years after launch. A robotic rescue craft sent up in July to push it higher lost two of its three reaction wheels. |
Wrapping up
America's October producer prices land at 2.30am Saturday in Auckland and 12.30am in Sydney, a week from today, and economists expect a 0.3% rise. October existing home sales follow at 4am Friday in Auckland.
Applied Materials reports after Thursday's US close, 10.30am Friday in Auckland, and orders from the memory chip makers are the line to watch. ANZ's full-year result lands on Monday in Sydney, Commonwealth Bank's quarterly update on Wednesday, and Stats NZ has October card spending on Thursday.
Friday's jobs number did most of the work on the currencies. USD/NZD rose about 1% to 1.81, a 19-month low for the kiwi, and USD/AUD rose to 1.46 as the Aussie touched its weakest since late March.
Polls are open, New Zealand. Enjoy the count tonight.