Daily newsletter · Thu 12 Nov 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Thu 12 Nov 2026 |
 Memory Regained Plus: Anthropic shipped a spreadsheet and Microsoft lost 2.3%. |
Good morning. Wall Street spent Wednesday buying back what it dumped last week. The S&P 500 rose 1.31% and the NASDAQ Composite added 1.60%, with the bond market shut for Veterans Day.
CoreWeave did most of the work. The company rents out computing power for artificial intelligence, and its results on Tuesday night came with a promise about how it will pay for the next lot of data centres. The shares rose 24.71%.
In other company news, Apple rose 2.04% to a record close of US$355.63 as investors moved toward the big technology name spending least on data centres. Elsewhere, Fossil jumped 26.68% after raising its full-year outlook and extending its licence to make Diesel watches. Finally, Azenta added 22% on quarterly earnings of 28 US cents a share against the 11 cents expected.
Dip buyers, duly rewarded.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,619.38 ▲ 1.31% | | NASDAQ 25,466.19 ▲ 1.60% | | NZX 50 14,179.86 ▲ 0.09% |
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ASX 200 9,153 ▲ 0.27% | | CoreWeave US$60.77 ▲ 24.71% | | Micron US$811.30 ▲ 11.89% |
| SEMICONDUCTORS |
Memory chip stocks rallied after CoreWeave promised to stay out of the bond market
Micron rose 11.89% to US$811.30 on Wednesday. SanDisk gained about 14%, Seagate just under 10% and South Korea's SK Hynix 9.4%. The VanEck semiconductor fund, which holds all of them, rose 6.3%.
The news that moved them came from a customer. CoreWeave's chief executive, Michael Intrator, said his company will not borrow in the unsecured debt market at current yields. It expects about US$9 billion of customer prepayments over the next three months, and will fund the build-out from those, its contracts and its own cash flow.
The selloff had been about funding all along. Memory makers spent the past month being sold on the fear that the companies buying their chips would run short of money. Orders never fell.
Micron still closed 35% below the US$1,255 it reached earlier this year. Morgan Stanley's Joseph Moore said the companies building AI infrastructure are still spending to plan, and that chip supply rather than building space is the bottleneck through 2027. Construction delays in Texas and Ohio are the exception he named.
What it hinges on whether the prepayments arrive. Goldman Sachs' James Schneider reckons AI shares are oversold, while warning that financing costs and power limits cap any rally this year. Our read is that the memory cycle now turns on who pays for the data centres rather than on how many chips they need. |
| SOFTWARE |
Microsoft fell 2.3% after its biggest cloud customer launched a rival to Excel
Microsoft closed at US$521.13 on Wednesday, down 2.3%, while almost everything else in technology rose. Anthropic had spent the morning launching three tools inside Claude: a spreadsheet, a shared whiteboard and a dashboard builder.
So why does that matter to Microsoft? Microsoft 365's cloud business brought in US$27.8 billion last quarter, 17% more than a year earlier. Excel sits in the middle of it. Anthropic's product lead, Nicholas Lin, called the new spreadsheet fairly basic and said Microsoft and Google are still better at serious financial modelling.
The two are tangled together. Anthropic agreed a year ago to buy US$30 billion of computing from Azure, and Microsoft agreed to invest up to US$5 billion in Anthropic.
The listing is a week away. Anthropic has set a range of US$70 to US$78 a share for 825 million shares, which would raise about US$64 billion, and Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the book is several times oversubscribed.
Seven chip and cloud companies will buy another US$26 billion of non-voting stock at the same price. Nvidia and Google are in for about US$10 billion each, Microsoft for about US$1 billion.
The other side Anthropic's revenue for the nine months to September was about US$33 billion and its operating loss US$1.26 billion. The net loss of US$104 billion is almost entirely a paper charge on the instruments it used to raise money. I'd want to see how much of the revenue comes from outside the seven companies buying the stock. |
| RETAIL |
David Jones will close half its stores, including its only one in New Zealand
The receivers running David Jones named the stores on Wednesday. Nineteen of the chain's 38 shops will stop trading by the end of the year, among them Newmarket in Auckland, its only site in New Zealand.
The chain is 188 years old. David Jones opened in Sydney in 1838 and went into voluntary administration last week. FTI Consulting's Christopher Hill, David McGrath and Joanne Dunn are running what they call an urgent restructure, and staff at the 19 stores have a seven-day consultation ahead of them.
New South Wales loses the most. Seven of its stores are going, including Parramatta, Hornsby, Macquarie Centre and Warringah Mall. Victoria and Western Australia lose three each, Queensland and South Australia two, and Canberra's Woden one.
The Australian consumer is under real pressure. The Reserve Bank of Australia has raised its cash rate five times this year, to 4.85%, and Commonwealth Bank said on Wednesday that home loan arrears had risen seven basis points to 0.80%.
Next up Christmas. A half-sized David Jones has to trade through the quarter that pays for the year while its receivers hunt for a buyer. Neither the Sydney nor the Melbourne city store is on the closure list, which tells you where the chain thinks it still works. |
Newsworthy numbers
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15.5% the fall in the value of new Australian home loans in the September quarter, to A$81.2 billion. That is the steepest quarterly drop since the Bureau of Statistics began counting in 2002, and investor lending fell 32.3%. | | 10% the record share of American first-home buyers who paid cash this year, in the National Association of Realtors' annual survey. The median first-home buyer is now 40, also a record. |
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US$44.8bn the price McCormick is paying for Unilever's food business, which Britain's competition regulator will investigate in depth unless the two offer remedies by 18 November. It has cleared them on mustard. | | 26.7bn the age of the universe in years under a model two University of Ottawa physicists have been testing, against the accepted 13.8 billion. It is a consistency test rather than a proof. |
Worth a read
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01 | Westpac changes most fixed home loan rates — the one-year fixed rate came down 20 basis points to 4.99% on Wednesday while the two-year went up 10, to 5.39%. Three, four and five-year term deposit rates were all cut 20 points. |
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02 | Apple faces unprecedented memory cost increases as RAM prices continue to surge — the bill at the other end of Wednesday's rally. Apple's manufacturing costs are set to climb by about US$33 billion, with the squeeze running through the holiday quarter and into 2027. |
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03 | easyJet shareholders approve £5.7bn Apollo takeover — 97% of them voted for it on Wednesday. Holders take 715p a share in cash, the brand and the headquarters stay, and 26 years as a listed company end when the deal closes by March. |
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04 | Hidden planet emerges from the glare — two Northwestern astronomers built a digital copy of the James Webb telescope, mirror flaws and all, then subtracted the starlight. Planets are a million times fainter than their stars, and their method found one hiding in two-year-old data. |
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05 | Obituary: Herbert Blomstedt (1927-2026) — the Swedish conductor died at home in Gothenburg on 4 November, aged 99, after seven decades on the podium that took in Dresden, San Francisco and Leipzig. He collected Japan's Praemium Imperiale this year. |
Wrapping up
America's October retail sales arrive on Tuesday 17 November in Washington, which is 2.30am Wednesday in Auckland and 12.30am in Sydney. Weekly jobless claims come sooner, at 2.30am Friday in Auckland and 12.30am in Sydney.
Home Depot, Target and Walmart report on consecutive mornings from Tuesday 17 November in New York, where the Christmas guidance matters more than the quarter behind it. Stats NZ has September migration figures at 10.45am today in Auckland, 8.45am in Sydney, and Australia's October jobs land at 1.30pm Thursday 19 November, 11.30am in Sydney.
USD/NZD rose to 1.80 and USD/AUD eased to 1.45. The kiwi's 0.75% slide was the bigger move of the two.
Newmarket loses its department store by Christmas. Back tomorrow.