Preview of the week starting 28Sep2026 - Payrolls, PCE and a coin-flip in Sydney
Economic Calendar (28Sep2026)
Economic calendar for the week (source: Investing.com, via Benson)
A genuinely live week: two US prints that can move the rates path, one central-bank decision that is too close to call, and China going quiet for Golden Week from Thursday.
1. The RBA decides — and the market has not made up its mind (Tuesday 29 September, 2:30 pm AEST). The cash rate sits at 4.35%. Pricing is roughly 55/45 between a 25 bp rise to 4.60% and a hold; NAB expects the rise this week, ANZ, CBA and Westpac lean to November. The awkward part: August CPI lands on Wednesday, after the vote, so the board decides with July's 3.5% headline (3.6% trimmed mean) as its freshest read. Whichever way it goes, the statement's wording will matter as much as the decision. A hike would extend a re-tightening pattern that is quietly spreading.
2. The Fed's preferred inflation gauge (Wednesday 30 September, 8:30 am ET). August Personal Income and Outlays brings core PCE — previous readings 3.3% year on year and 0.2% month on month — the first inflation print since the Fed's September rise. The same morning delivers ADP employment (previous +38K), the third estimate of Q2 GDP (previous +2.1%, forecast +1.5%) and China's September manufacturing PMI (previous 49.8, sitting on the contraction line). Micron reports that evening, so AI capex and inflation get checked in a single session.
3. September payrolls (Friday 2 October, 8:30 am ET). Nonfarm payrolls previous +162K, unemployment 4.1%, average hourly earnings +0.3% month on month. After two soft labour readings over the summer, a third would sharpen the question of whether the Fed has tightened into a cooling jobs market; a rebound would do the opposite. Thursday's weekly claims (previous 197K) and the ISM manufacturing PMI (previous 54.6, prices paid 71.1) are the warm-up acts — that prices-paid sub-index is the one to watch with oil where it is.
Also on the radar: Monday pending home sales; Tuesday JOLTS openings (previous 7.271M) and Conference Board consumer confidence (previous 89.4); Wednesday crude inventories (previous +2.969M barrels); China and Hong Kong closed from Thursday for National Day / Golden Week, which thins Asia liquidity into the US payrolls print.
Earnings Calendar (28Sep2026)
A short, high-quality slate — compiled from the Earnings Whispers calendar:
· Monday: Genus (GNS) before the open; Vail Resorts (MTN), Jefferies (JEF) after the close
· Tuesday: Carnival (CCL), CarMax (KMX), Uranium Energy (UEC) before the open; Concentrix (CNXC), AAR (AIR) after the close
· Wednesday: Conagra (CAG), Jabil (JBL), FactSet (FDS) before the open; Micron (MU) after the close
· Thursday: Accenture (ACN), Acuity (AYI), McCormick (MKC) before the open; Nike (NKE) after the close
· Friday: nothing of note
Earnings calendar for the week (source: Earnings Whispers, via Benson)
This week's deep dive: Micron (MU), reporting fiscal Q4 2026 on Wednesday 30 September after the close (conference call 4:30 pm ET). Data compiled by Kimi from the Yahoo Finance plugin and public sources. Let us walk through it the way we would qualify any business for a portfolio — and notice where the hard questions sit.
Valuation and market sentiment. Micron closed Friday at US$1,082.28, up roughly 589% over twelve months — a rise that has carried the market capitalisation to about US$1.22 trillion. The trailing price-to-earnings ratio is 24.5x, yet the forward P/E is just 6.8x. That gap is the single most important number in this piece: it tells us analysts expect earnings to more than triple from the trailing base. When a cyclical looks "expensive" backwards and "cheap" forwards, the market is not pricing the present — it is pricing a forecast. Forty-six analysts cover the stock; the consensus is strong buy with a mean target of US$1,515.54, implying ~40% upside. Treat that target as a sentiment gauge, not a promise: twelve months ago, the same process produced targets a fraction of today's price.
The demand backdrop. Two thematic currents meet here. First, AI infrastructure: high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is the binding constraint on AI accelerator output, Micron's 2026 HBM supply is sold out, and SK Hynix has said the same — this is an industry-wide structural deficit, not one company's marketing. Micron can currently fulfil only 50–66% of what major customers request. Second, the helium problem: Iranian strikes on Qatar's Ras Laffan complex disrupted roughly a third of global helium supply, and Korea's memory fabs (65% Qatari helium dependence) are rationing. Micron's Taiwan-centred production is less exposed to that specific input, which is a quiet relative advantage. The counterweight is concentration risk: Taiwan is Micron's key production hub, it just paid US$1.8B for an additional Powerchip fab site there, and — as September's labour standoff showed, below — everything from geology to geopolitics to a single union vote now sits between this company and its customers.
Revenue growth and profitability — the five-year picture. This is where Micron teaches the cyclicality lesson better than any textbook (fiscal years end August):
Three years ago this company lost US$5.8 billion. That is not ancient history; it is what this industry does when supply overshoots. The TTM figures show the opposite extreme: trailing net margin near 56%, and Q3 alone produced US$41.5B of revenue at a 68% net margin. A retail investor should read the 2023 loss column as the risk premium explanation for everything else on this page.
Balance sheet. At FY2025 year-end: total assets US$82.8B, liabilities US$28.6B, equity US$54.2B. Total debt of US$15.3B against that equity gives a debt-to-equity ratio of about 0.28 — conservative for a capital-hungry manufacturer, and cash has since built to ~US$26B on a TTM basis. This is a balance sheet built by people who remember 2023: it can survive a downcycle without diluting shareholders. That is what "quality" means in a cyclical.
Cash flow — the chapter worth reading twice. FY2025 operating cash flow was US$17.5B, but capital expenditure consumed US$15.9B, leaving free cash flow of just US$1.7B. On TTM numbers, operating cash flow has surged to ~US$51.4B yet free cash flow is only ~US$7.6B — because the company is simultaneously building a US$100B megafab complex in New York, two fabs in Idaho, and expanding in Taiwan. At a US$1.22T market cap, the stock trades near 160x trailing free cash flow. Earnings are an opinion shaped by depreciation schedules; cash is a fact. Right now the facts say: magnificent income statement, modest cash generation, enormous reinvestment. Whether that reinvestment earns its keep is the entire long-term question.
Recent news roundup (compiled by Kimi). HBM4 is ramping at twice the pace of HBM3E, targeting ~100,000 wafers per month by year-end with cumulative HBM4 revenue past US$1B by June; the Crucial consumer memory brand is being wound down to prioritise enterprise AI customers; the US$1.8B Powerchip Taiwan site acquisition accelerates DRAM capacity from H2 2027; and management reiterated this month that the memory shortage extends beyond 2026. The item Benson flagged: in Taiwan, where Micron employs ~15,000 people at its most important manufacturing hub, unions representing roughly two-thirds of the local workforce had signalled support for a strike; on 11 September Micron settled the matter with its richest-ever payouts — bonuses of 35 to 68 months of pay for fiscal 2026, a minimum cash package of T$1.7 million, and an annual equity grant for every employee. Two readings sit side by side. The generous one: when a company can hand out five years of salary as a bonus, the cycle is genuinely extraordinary. The cautious one: management chose to pay rather than risk a stoppage at the heart of its production — which tells you how tight supply is, how much pricing power labour suddenly has in this upcycle (Samsung's May standoff set the precedent with a 10.5%-of-operating-profit bonus pool), and how much of this windfall is already being shared. Watch Wednesday's call for what these payouts do to the cost line.
The forecast. Consensus for Wednesday: EPS of ~US$31.45–31.56 (33 analysts, range US$28.04–37.44 — that wide dispersion is itself information) on revenue of ~US$50.9–51.2B, versus management's own guide of US$50B ± US$1B and non-GAAP EPS US$31.00 ± US$1.00 with ~86% gross margin. Micron has beaten estimates four quarters running, by ~21% on average — which cuts both ways: the bar for a "surprise" is now very high. What we would watch: gross margin durability, HBM4 qualification progress, capex guidance for FY2027, and any hint that conventional DRAM pricing is normalising. This is not financial advice; it is one company's file, opened so we can practise reading it. Please do your own due diligence before acting on anything here. Zacks via Yahoo Finance
Market Outlook of S&P500 (28Sep2026)
Technicals as of Friday 25 September close, pulled via Yahoo Finance data:
S&P 500 intraday, Friday 25 September (via Benson)
· Close: 7,743.41 — just 0.94% below the 52-week high of 7,816.70, and +12.9% year to date
· Moving averages: price above the MA50 (7,636) and MA200 (7,205); MA50 above MA200 — the uptrend is intact on every timeframe we track
· MACD: 18.83 versus signal 10.74, with the histogram ticking up (8.09 from 6.34) — momentum re-accelerating after a flat patch
· RSI(14): 56.7 — constructive, not stretched
· Chaikin Money Flow (20): +0.032 — modest but positive; money is trickling in, not flooding
Set against that: the CNN Fear & Greed Index closed the week at 37 (fear), having been 35 mid-week. ⚠️ This is via the finhacker.cz mirror of CNN's series, not CNN directly — worth a screenshot from the source before publishing, as last week.
One way to read this divergence: the tape says trend and breadth are healthy, while the sentiment gauges say investors are already braced for something to go wrong. Historically that combination — price near highs with fear elevated — has more often been a wall-of-worry tailwind than a warning. The counterpoint is the calendar: PCE on Wednesday and payrolls on Friday can each move the rates story, and the Fed has just demonstrated it will act on inflation. A hot PCE print into thin Golden Week liquidity would test the MA50 quickly; a soft one probably retests the highs.
Weekly Outlook: NEUTRAL. The indicators are unanimously bullish, but with event risk stacked on Wednesday and Friday, we would rather hold our positions and let the data come to us than add ahead of it. A weekly close below the MA50 (~7,636) would soften this posture; a close above 7,817 on the back of benign data would argue for turning more constructive.
News and my thoughts from the past week (28Sep2026)
Benson's selected items (drafted from his inputs, his fact-check notes applied):
1. Weather and natural disasters across Asia. Typhoon Dujuan swept Japan's Kanto region around 21–23 September, bringing record rainfall, landslides and flooding with a rising death toll, and another storm was intensifying near Okinawa by week's end. Vietnam is still recovering from heavy rain and flooding across its northern and north-central provinces from mid-September, with homes inundated and crops damaged. In Thailand, all 50 Bangkok districts were declared disaster areas after severe rainfall, school closures and disruption to government travel — continued rain raises the risk of worse. In the Pacific, Hurricane Polo is real but its near-term threat is Mexico and Baja California Sur, with surf and rip-current risks extending further north; claims of compounded California coastal damage should be softened unless stronger evidence emerges. For investors, the thread connecting these is not any single storm but the compounding: food, freight and insurance costs in an El Niño year.
2. Ukraine–Russia: the grinding backdrop to energy. Peace-talk efforts remain protracted with no clear breakthrough, and Ukraine's continuing strikes on Russian oil-refining infrastructure are contributing to fuel tightness and export pressure. These are ongoing developments rather than isolated recent events — but they are part of why diesel and crude stay elevated, and why central banks from Oslo to Sydney keep citing energy in their statements.
3. The US midterms approach. With the elections only weeks away, late-September polling shows President Trump's approval running weak, and Republicans are openly concerned about losing the House and possibly the Senate. The impeachment framing deserves precision: the talk of impeachment arises if Democrats take the House — not the other way round. For markets, the nearer question is simpler: a White House facing hostile polling has every incentive to jawbone fuel prices down, which puts items like the Exxon refinery outage in a political spotlight.
4. Artificial intelligence: the control question. Concerns about slowing or better controlling frontier-model development are credible and growing; how US restraint might affect developers in Asia remains genuinely uncertain. One caution in wording: claims that companies cannot control their models go beyond the evidence — the honest statement is that the debate about control is unresolved. Xi's call in Washington this week to keep AI under human control lands in exactly this conversation.
Alternates from the shortlist
1. 📷 The 30-year Treasury yield hits 5.51%. The long bond has climbed almost uninterrupted from ~4.85% in July to 5.514% — the relentless, unglamorous force underneath everything else this week. (TradingView chart, US30Y daily)
2. 📷 *A record share of S&P 500 stocks now move against the index.* The proportion of constituents with negative beta is the highest in history — individual stocks doing the opposite of the market at a record rate. Correlation breakdowns like this often appear near crowded positioning. - Barchart, via X
US 30-year Treasury yield, daily (TradingView, via Benson)
3. 📷 A diesel supply shock inside an oil shock. Exxon Mobil has shut one of the largest diesel refineries in the Midwest (~11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel a day) on outage issues, just as diesel prices are up nearly 90% this year and the US enters peak demand season; $7.00/gallon is now being discussed. - X user The Kobeissi Letter
4. 📷 The political cost of US$98 petrol. President Trump posted that "gas prices were much higher under Biden than under TRUMP" — drawing the reply from X user Wendy Patterson that the promised 50% deficit reduction, lower inflation, sub-$2 petrol and $21 trillion of investment have not materialised. Meanwhile Gallup finds perceived corruption in the US government at a record 89%. Watch the approval-rating-to-policy pipeline as fuel bites. - Real America's Voice / Truth Social via X; Gallup
Truth Social post (Real America's Voice, via Benson)
Perceived corruption in US government (Gallup, via Benson)
5. 📷 Data-centre debt is repricing. The RPLDCI 6.581% senior secured bonds due 2049 (the "Project Beignet" data-centre financing) have slid from ~110 last October to ~94.8, with the slide accelerating since July. Equity markets are celebrating AI capex; the bond market is quietly charging more for it. - bond price chart via X
RPLDCI 6.581% due 2049 'Project Beignet' bond price (via Benson)
6. 📷 The "Cairn" hacking campaign, mapped. Between 10–15 September, up to 25 parallel intrusion campaigns ran against mostly US e-commerce and retail targets — card skimmers deployed, data exfiltrated, admin panels seized. The digital front of this conflict is hitting small retailers, not just governments. - threat research chart, 10–15 September 2026
7. Trump–Xi in Washington. The two presidents met on Thursday 24 September; Xinhua reported mutual support for hosting APEC and the G20, talk of "new trade arrangements" described as good news, and a call from Xi to keep AI under human control. [Newsquawk, 24 September]
8. The re-tightening club grows. Norges Bank raised its policy rate 25 bp to 4.50% on 23 September, citing low Strait of Hormuz shipping, Red Sea attacks and El Niño-driven rises in food and energy futures — and flagged readiness to go further. The Riksbank held at 1.75% but warned inflation is expected to rise; the SNB held at 0%. After the Fed's rise the prior week, the direction of global policy is no longer in much doubt. Norges Bank (https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/monetary-policy/Monetary-policy-meetings/2026/september-2026/), Central Banking (https://www.centralbanking.com/central-banks/monetary-policy/monetary-policy-decisions/7977033/switzerland-sweden-and-hungary-hold-rates-norway-hikes)
9. Costco's steady quarter — with a footnote. Q4 revenue of US$95.72B and GAAP EPS of US$6.75 beat expectations, but US$0.15 of that EPS was a one-off IEEPA tariff refund; comparable sales rose 9.4% (6.7% adjusted) and digital grew 19.5%. ⚠️ Sources differ on the revenue consensus (US$95.0B vs US$96.76B), which flips the headline between "beat" and "narrow miss".
10. Oil keeps easing despite the headlines. Crude fell for four straight sessions into Monday 21 September (WTI ~US$98, Brent ~US$102) even as Norges Bank cited Hormuz and Red Sea disruption in its rationale for hiking — though the Exxon refinery shutdown (item 3) may change that.
My Investing Muse (28Sep2026)
11. When a beat is not quite a beat — Costco's US$0.15 tariff refund inside a US$0.21 EPS beat raises a question worth sitting with: how much of this earnings season is operating performance, and how much is accounting weather? Tariff refunds, one-off credits, buyback-flattered EPS. What would earnings look like stripped to the boring core?
12. The central-bank pincer — the Fed has raised, Norway has raised, Sydney may follow on Tuesday, and oil is still near US$100. We spent three years waiting for cheaper money; the more interesting question now is what expensive money does — slowly, then suddenly — to leveraged balance sheets, commercial property, and the consumer's appetite for US$98 petrol.
13. Fear at the highs — the Fear & Greed Index sits at 37 while the S&P closes 1% below its record. When everyone is braced for the fall, who is left to sell? Or is the fear simply early?
Financial Strategy and Outlook
Let us close with the principles that keep us steady regardless of what the week brings. Spend within our means. Invest only what we can afford to lose. Avoid leverage, especially with rates rising and volatility returning. Keep a watchlist, buy quality at sensible prices, diversify across sectors and geographies, and let position sizing — not conviction — carry the risk. Review, rebalance, and never let a single week's headlines rewrite a long-term plan.
Wishing everyone a successful week ahead.
@TigerStars $MU$ $NKE$ $SPY$ #HigherForLonger
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