Daily newsletter · Fri 13 Nov 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Fri 13 Nov 2026 |
 Nvidia Without Jensen Plus: American existing home sales are at a 16-year low. |
Good morning, and welcome to Friday. Nvidia told the market at 8.48am in New York that Jensen Huang had resigned as chief executive, effective immediately. The shares fell 14% at the open and closed at US$166.19, down 4.34%.
The bond market did the broader damage. The 10-year Treasury yield went back above 5% after Donald Trump ruled out a deal with Iran and oil turned higher. Small caps copped it, down 1.66%. Cheap oil cured a lot, for a week.
In other company news, Nebius fell 16.8% after lifting its capital spending plan for this year to US$27 billion. Elsewhere, Corteva dropped 24.3% on a 9% fall in quarterly sales and a weaker outlook for Brazil. Finally, Yeti lost 10.4% after missing on revenue and cutting its full-year guidance.
A resignation, then a shrug.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,592.40 ▼ 0.35% | | NASDAQ 25,366.09 ▼ 0.39% | | NZX 50 14,259.23 ▲ 0.56% |
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ASX 200 9,146.80 ▼ 0.07% | | Nvidia US$166.19 ▼ 4.34% | | Strategy US$114.41 ▼ 6.49% |
| BIG TECH |
Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday morning and Nvidia closed down 4.34%
The statement came before the opening bell. Huang has resigned as president, chief executive and a director, effective immediately, after 33 years. The shares bottomed at US$148.80, 14.3% below Wednesday's close.
So who is running Nvidia now? Colette Kress, chief financial officer since 2013, is interim chief executive and keeps the finance job while the board hunts for a permanent replacement. She spent close to 25 years in finance roles at Cisco, Microsoft and other technology companies before she joined.
The resignation followed a board inquiry opened on Monday. It was looking into reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, alongside reports of extramarital affairs. Harvey Jones, who ran Synopsys, becomes the first chair in Nvidia's history.
Everything else in chips had a good day. AMD rose 5.86% and Broadcom 5.54%, and Nvidia had already given up 8.5% before the announcement, most of it in Wednesday's after-hours trading.
Our take the quarter Nvidia reports on Tuesday was earned under Huang, and the company has guided revenue to about US$108 billion. Kress has signed off every number it has published since 2013. I'd want to see where the permanent chief executive comes from, because an outside hire would say the board wants a different company. |
| RATES |
The 10-year Treasury yield is back above 5% and American housing is already paying for it
The 10-year Treasury yield rose about 13 basis points on Thursday to a little over 5.1%. The two-year added 15 basis points to 4.879%.
The move started with oil. Trump posted that the United States does not need a deal with Iran, because it already has Iran's money and its strait. West Texas Intermediate settled 2% higher at US$88.19 and Brent 1.9% higher at US$94.48.
Dearer crude feeds inflation, and the Federal Reserve is raising rates to fight inflation. A quarter-point rise in December was priced at 88% after Tuesday's consumer price report. Futures have it fully priced this morning.
The cost of all this turns up in housing first. American existing home sales fell 5.5% in October to an annual pace of 3.75 million, the weakest in 16 years, with 1.59 million homes sitting on the market. Weekly jobless claims rose 9,000 to 200,000.
A word of caution Chris Rupkey of FWDBONDS reckons higher rates are now driving the housing correction deeper. Our read is that a 10-year above 5% works on American mortgages first, and October's home sales are the early evidence. |
| INDEX RULES |
MSCI is removing bitcoin's biggest corporate holder from its equity indexes
Strategy closed at US$114.41 on Thursday, down 6.49% and at its lowest since August. MSCI confirmed that the company leaves the MSCI USA Index and its broad US indexes at the close of 30 November.
The test MSCI has written is a simple one. A company with at least half of its total assets in digital currency is now treated as an investment fund, and a fund does not belong in a share index. Strategy is the first company cut under the rule.
Index funds that track those benchmarks have to sell. Estimates of the forced selling start at about US$1.6 billion, and JPMorgan has put it at US$2.8 billion. Michael Saylor's company has bought most of its bitcoin by issuing new shares.
Japan's Metaplanet and the smaller Upexi go at the same time, and the ether holder SharpLink sits on a watchlist. Bitcoin fell about 4% on Thursday to around US$71,500. Strategy's shares are down 49% over the past year.
The short version Strategy has been reclassified as a fund, so the money that held it only because the index did has to go. The 30 November close is the deadline for that selling, and after it the company needs another way to pay for bitcoin. |
Newsworthy numbers
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US$1.29trn American credit card balances at the end of September, a record, in the New York Federal Reserve's quarterly report. The average cardholder owes US$6,678. | | 22,600 New Zealand's net migration gain in the year to September, against 9,900 the year before. Departures of 15 to 24-year-olds took 11,500 out on their own. |
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US$18.5bn Cisco's quarterly revenue, a record, up 24% on a year ago and reported after Thursday's close. Applied Materials followed with US$10.41 billion, up 53%. | | US$74bn what SpaceX says it will spend on two artificial intelligence campuses, in Texas and Arizona. The Arizona site is designed to draw six gigawatts. |
Worth a read
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01 | Super growth outpaces property — Jason Spits on SuperConcepts' numbers. Superannuation added A$231 billion to Australian household wealth in the June quarter while residential property lost A$34 billion, the widest gap in six years. Super is now 24.3% of household net worth, up from 12.5% in 1989. |
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02 | Mainfreight profit jumps 66.4% to $155.4m in first half — revenue up 19.8% to $3.12 billion for the six months to September, the dividend held at 85 cents, and the transport division's pre-tax profit almost doubled. The shares rose 5.9% on Thursday and carried the NZX 50 to a record. |
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03 | Whisky's new twist — Maison Lineti, a French distillery, ferments in concrete eggs for seven days against the two or three days Scotch gets, and sells a three-and-a-half-year-old whisky on the strength of it. Less time in the barrel also means less lost to evaporation. |
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04 | Ancient tooth protein reveals 'all-female' fossil site of extinct human relation — 23 teeth from at least 20 Homo naledi individuals in South Africa's Rising Star cave, and not one carried the male marker. The other explanation is a population that lost the gene entirely. |
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05 | Richard Posner, longtime federal judge and 'prolific' legal scholar, dies at 87 — the judge who brought economics into American law wrote nearly 3,300 opinions and more than 60 books, and campaigned against jargon in legal writing for most of that time. |
Wrapping up
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand's next call is a Monetary Policy Statement at 2pm on Wednesday 9 December in Auckland, noon in Sydney, with the cash rate sitting at 2.75%. It lands about 18 hours before the Federal Reserve's December decision.
Nvidia reports on Tuesday 17 November in New York, at 10.20am Wednesday in Auckland and 8.20am in Sydney. It has kept the date despite losing its chief executive. Anthropic prices its float the next day and trades under the ticker ANT from Thursday.
USD/NZD held at 1.80 and USD/AUD edged up to 1.46.
Enjoy Show Day, Canterbury. Back tomorrow.