Daily newsletter · Sat 14 Nov 2026
 | Sharespective Wall Street, before morning tea | Daily newsletter Sat 14 Nov 2026 |
 The Chip Trade Unwinds Plus: American producer prices are rising at their fastest annual pace in nearly four years. |
Good morning. Wall Street spent Friday selling the one trade that had made the week work. The S&P 500 slipped 0.40% and the NASDAQ Composite lost 0.91%, while the Dow edged up 0.10%.
Semiconductors did the damage, and the rest of the market barely flinched. Healthcare shares rallied, and the S&P 500 still ended the week 2.51% higher after four losing weeks in a row.
In company news, Newsmax rose 31.41% on quarterly revenue of US$69 million, up 52.5%, and a net profit of US$15.2 million against a loss a year ago. Elsewhere, Modine jumped 27.86% after Bloomberg reported that Samsung Electronics wants to buy the Wisconsin cooling-equipment maker. Finally, Cerebras added 11.22% on record quarterly revenue of US$210.8 million and a raised full-year forecast.
Boring had a good day.
Market snapshot
S&P 500 7,561.67 ▼ 0.40% | | NASDAQ 25,136.27 ▼ 0.91% | | NZX 50 14,173.68 ▼ 0.60% |
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ASX 200 9,082.25 ▼ 0.71% | | AMD US$534.06 ▼ 8.75% | | Cisco US$95.64 ▼ 6.24% |
| SEMICONDUCTORS |
The chip trade cracked on Friday and AMD was the worst stock in the S&P 500
AMD closed at US$534.06 on Friday, down 8.75% and last in the S&P 500. Broadcom fell 4.76% to US$347.01, Micron about 5% and SanDisk about 9%.
This was Monday's trade running backwards. AMD rose 13.26% that day as money came out of Nvidia and into its nearest rival. It kept going all week and reached US$585.30 on Thursday, which left plenty to give back.
Two downgrades landed the same morning. HSBC's Frank Lee cut Nvidia to hold with a target of US$170 against US$365, and Rothschild & Co Redburn's Mike Harrison moved Broadcom to neutral at US$398 against US$595. Nvidia fell 2.01% to US$162.85 and closed worth less than US$4 trillion for the first time since 2025.
Harrison's objection was about who pays for the chips. Broadcom has written financing guarantees to help Anthropic and OpenAI buy them, and he wants to see both laboratories paying their own way before he pays up for the earnings.
Cisco had the day's oddest result. Revenue of US$18.5 billion was a record, up 24%, and the company raised its full-year forecast. The shares fell 6.24% to US$95.64, because gross margin dropped about 250 basis points and product orders grew 21% after 35% the quarter before.
The verdict our read is that the market has started pricing what AI revenue costs rather than how quickly it arrives, and Cisco's margin is the clearest evidence of that yet. Nvidia's result on Tuesday will get the same treatment. |
| INFLATION |
American producer prices are rising at their fastest annual pace since November 2022
Producer prices rose 0.3% in October, below the 0.4% economists expected. The annual rate came in at 6.5%, the highest in nearly four years.
So why did bond yields rise on a soft number? The annual rate is the one the Federal Reserve has to answer for. Prices excluding food, energy and trade services rose 0.5% in October, the same as September, and food alone rose 1.3% on the month.
The week's move in the bond market was much larger than Friday's. The two-year Treasury yield added 35.2 basis points over the five sessions to 4.872%, its biggest weekly move since September 2024.
The 10-year finished at 5.152%, up 29.4 basis points and ending five straight weeks of falls. Futures now treat a December rise as a near certainty, with about 88% on a quarter point and 12% on a half.
Where it bites producer prices are what companies pay before they decide what to charge, so October's 6.5% is a fair guess at the pressure still to reach shoppers. The core measure has run at 0.5% for two months now, and that is the line to follow into December. |
| DEALS |
A SpaceX takeover of Tesla gets dearer every time SpaceX shares fall
Bloomberg reported on Friday that SpaceX and Tesla could announce a merger as soon as December, with a slip into early 2027 also on the table. Special committees of independent directors are running the talks, and the open items are price and control.
The arithmetic has moved against SpaceX all month. Its shares closed at US$139.11 on Friday, 12.7% below where they sat on 21 October, when Elon Musk first said both boards were looking at a deal. Tesla closed at US$390.22 and is almost exactly where it was that day.
That gap decides who ends up owning what. At SpaceX's June price of about US$200, buying Tesla at a 15% premium would have taken roughly 2.3 SpaceX shares for each Tesla share. Near US$140 it takes about 3.2, so SpaceX issues around 40% more stock for the same company.
Tesla holders would then own more than half the combined business, against about 43% at the higher price. Joel Shulman of ERShares says his greatest concern is the price SpaceX would have to pay. Nathan Johnson, Texas's incoming attorney general, says a merger of that consequence warrants tremendous scrutiny.
The sticking point the committees are settling an exchange ratio that moves every session, and the cheaper SpaceX gets the more of itself it hands over. Polymarket puts an announcement by the end of June 2027 at 54%. I'd watch how Tesla's China business gets walled off, because nobody has an answer to that one yet. |
Newsworthy numbers
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51.0 the University of Michigan's preliminary consumer sentiment reading for November, up from 48.0 in October and well past the 48.0 economists expected. Sentiment improved for everyone except the households with the largest share portfolios, who went 5% the other way. | | 11 points the drop in forward orders in NAB's October survey of Australian business, to minus 12. Business conditions are the weakest since August 2020, and retailers reported the gloomiest conditions, confidence and orders of any industry. |
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US$67,555 the low bitcoin touched on Friday, its weakest since 19 August, as forced selling of leveraged positions picked up. | | 100,000 times how much faster than today's silicon electronics could in principle switch, after physicists at the University of Regensburg measured a hard limit on how precisely an electron can be pinned down in both space and time at once. Nature Photonics published it on 7 November. |
Worth a read
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01 | Housing market stumbles in October as sales slump and prices stagnate — Greg Ninness on Friday's REINZ figures. Sales fell 23.5% from October last year to 5,840, Auckland's were down 30%, and the national median eased 3.4% to $763,000. Only four of 16 districts rose. |
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02 | FTC Sues to Block Proposed $3.5 Billion Covetrus-MWI Merger — the regulator says joining the two biggest suppliers to American vet clinics would raise the cost of treating dogs and cats. Covetrus says the opposite, and will argue it in a New York court. |
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03 | Anthropic's IPO Is About Six Times Oversubscribed — the book holds six times the orders for the shares on offer, at a fully diluted valuation of about US$1.4 trillion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are co-leading it with 20 other banks, and Nvidia is in for roughly US$10 billion. |
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04 | Euclid space telescope shares first major data release, including map of 900 million galaxies and 15,000 gravitational lenses — thirteen months of observing, more than a billion objects, and a patch of sky the size of 9,500 full moons. The European Space Agency has published 1.7 million gigabytes of it. |
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05 | The Brain Injury That Made Edward Freytag A Musical Genius — Sadie Dingfelder, writing for the New York Times Magazine, on a percussionist who came out of a motorcycle crash with perfect pitch and no memory of writing the 50 pages of music sitting on his own computer. It faded as his brain healed. |
Wrapping up
American housing starts and building permits for October land at 2.30am Thursday in Auckland and 12.30am in Sydney. They are the first read on construction since the 10-year Treasury yield went through 5%. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand publishes its quarterly survey of inflation expectations on Tuesday.
Disney reports before Tuesday's open in New York, where the streaming division's profit is the line to find. Palo Alto Networks follows after Wednesday's close and Alibaba on Thursday morning. Closer to home, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Infratil both report half-year results on Wednesday.
USD/NZD held at 1.80, leaving the kiwi at its weakest against the US dollar since April 2025. USD/AUD rose to 1.47 as the dollar index put in its best week in two months.
The All Blacks are in Cardiff at 3.10am Sunday. Enjoy your weekend.