Daily newsletter · Wed 11 Nov 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Wed 11 Nov 2026 |
 The Half-Point Problem Plus: CoreWeave added US$28 billion to its order book in three months. |
Good morning. Wall Street gave back a slice of Monday's rally after October's inflation report landed hotter than expected. The S&P 500 slipped 0.38% and the NASDAQ Composite lost 0.74%.
The detail was worse than the headline. Core prices rose 0.3% for a third month running, and Fed governor Christopher Waller had already named 0.3% as the level at which he would consider a half-point rise next month.
In company news, Nvidia fell another 5.42% to US$168.99 after its board hired a law firm and a former federal prosecutor to run its inquiry into Jensen Huang. Elsewhere, Hims & Hers dropped 18% on a surprise quarterly loss and another cut to its profit guidance. Finally, PepGen more than doubled on mid-stage trial results for its myotonic dystrophy drug.
So much for Monday.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,520.93 ▼ 0.38% | | NASDAQ 25,065.87 ▼ 0.74% | | NZX 50 14,167.41 ▲ 1.39% |
| | ||||
ASX 200 9,129.00 ▲ 1.10% | | Take-Two US$224.00 ▲ 8.00% | | Nvidia US$168.99 ▼ 5.42% |
| ECONOMY |
October's inflation report put a half-point rate rise back on the table
American consumer prices rose 0.4% in October, against the 0.3% economists expected. Core prices, which leave out food and energy, rose 0.3% for the third month in a row.
The core number is the one Waller had circled. The Fed governor said last month that a core reading of 0.3% or more would make a half-point rise worth considering in December. Tuesday's report delivered exactly that, and he repeated the point hours after it landed.
One number was missing entirely. The Bureau of Labor Statistics could not publish an annual inflation rate, because last year's government shutdown meant October 2025 prices were never collected.
Bond markets moved first. The two-year Treasury yield jumped 18 basis points to 4.731%, and the 10-year added about 12 to 4.99%, within a whisker of 5%. Karen Manna at Federated Hermes called it the report the market could least afford to see.
Then the odds caught up. A quarter-point rise in December was priced at 77% a week ago and 88% after the report, and a half-point went from zero to about 11%. The target range today is 3.75% to 4.00%.
The catch shelter accounted for more than 30% of October's increase, and that part of the index moves slowly whatever the Fed does. A half point is a real risk in December rather than the base case, and Waller is one vote of twelve. |
| AI INFRASTRUCTURE |
CoreWeave's order book hit US$132.5 billion and its lenders are owed US$41.6 billion
CoreWeave finished September with a revenue backlog of about US$132.5 billion, up from roughly US$104 billion three months earlier. Quarterly revenue was US$3.66 billion, nearly three times what it was a year earlier.
So why are the shares 65% below their high? CoreWeave has borrowed heavily to build. It carries about US$41.6 billion of recourse debt, and interest in the December quarter alone will cost between US$1.05 billion and US$1.15 billion.
The quarter made money until the interest arrived. Adjusted operating income was US$379 million, a 10% margin. The net loss was US$709 million.
Active power doubled this year to more than 1.7 gigawatts, out of the 4.6 gigawatts it has under contract. Full-year revenue guidance went up, to between US$13 billion and US$13.3 billion. The shares closed just under US$49 and added about 2% after hours.
What to watch CoreWeave will spend US$37 billion to US$39 billion this year, roughly three times what it books in revenue. Our read is that an order book that size only matters while the lenders keep turning up, so the next debt raise says more than the next quarter does. |
| GAMING |
Take-Two rose 8% on a pre-order number nobody outside the company has seen
Take-Two closed at US$224.00 on Tuesday, up 8%, after telling investors that pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI are running far above what it expected. It did not say how far.
The quarter it actually reported was poor. Net bookings fell 18% to US$1.60 billion, below the company's own guidance of US$1.62 billion to US$1.67 billion. The shares rose anyway.
The game arrives on 19 November at US$79.99 for the standard edition and US$99.99 for the ultimate edition. Take-Two has guided December-quarter bookings to between US$3.35 billion and US$3.5 billion.
José Montalvo, an economics professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, reckons about 1.5 million American workers will skip a day's work for the launch, at a cost of roughly US$1 billion in lost output.
The tell Take-Two has kept its full-year bookings forecast at US$8 billion to US$8.2 billion, which is the number that commits it to something. I'd want to see the opening weekend before taking the pre-order talk at face value. |
Newsworthy numbers
| | |
US$3.98 the American average for a gallon of petrol on Tuesday, under US$4 for the first time since July. Crude has fallen and refineries have switched to the cheaper winter blend. | | 68.1 Westpac and the Melbourne Institute's November sentiment reading for Australian households with a mortgage, down 11.6% in a month and the lowest on figures going back to 1994. |
| | ||
| | |
26% how far gold sits below the record of US$5,501.70 an ounce it set on 29 January. It fell about 2% on Tuesday as yields climbed. | | 1 in 10bn how rare the particle decay is that CERN's LHCb experiment has finally found evidence of. The search has been running for more than 40 years, which is longer than the Large Hadron Collider has existed. |
Worth a read
| |
01 | Cost of living drives down retirement confidence — Mike Taylor on Investment Trends' annual read of Australian retirement. Just 28% of pre-retirees say they feel prepared, a ten-year low, and 49% now plan to spend less once they stop. |
| |
02 | Chinese AI firms want Silicon Valley's top minds. Poaching them won't be easy — Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou on ByteDance's Seed unit advertising 71 American jobs. OpenAI offers research engineers US$250,000 to US$445,000 before equity, while MiniMax averaged about US$203,000 a head. |
| |
03 | Honda reports robust results on the back of healthy motorcycle sales — the Associated Press on a record 11.9 million motorbikes sold in six months. Those bikes are funding an electric car programme that lost ¥484.8 billion over the same six months. |
| |
04 | Scientists just found dinosaur blood that survived 115 million years — a Curtin University team found fossilised red blood cells, and the chemical signature of haemoglobin, inside the leg bones of a theropod dug out of north-eastern Brazil. |
| |
05 | Texas-born Donnie Dunagan, U.S. Marine and voice of Bambi, dies — Nathan Cone on a child actor who voiced young Bambi, then spent 25 years in the Marine Corps and came home with three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. He hid the Bambi part to avoid being called Major Bambi. |
Wrapping up
The minutes of the Fed's 28 October meeting are released on 18 November in Washington, which is 8am Thursday 19 November in Auckland and 6am in Sydney. They now carry a question nobody was asking a fortnight ago: how many on the committee already wanted to move.
Cerebras Systems reports after Thursday's close in New York, and cloud revenue is the line to watch after it nearly quadrupled year on year last quarter. Closer to home, Fonterra holds its annual meeting at 10.30am Thursday, at Mystery Creek near Hamilton.
USD/NZD rose to 1.79 and USD/AUD to 1.46, with the Australian dollar down about 1% on the day. Tuesday's inflation report lifted the US dollar index 0.57%.
A minute's silence at eleven, then back tomorrow.