Hot inflation raises rate fears; Woolies outdoes Coles; driverless car future
Published: August 26, 2026
Hot inflation raises rate fears; Woolies outdoes Coles; driverless car future
News in brief
Woolworths' share price rose 3.4 per cent yesterday after the number one supermarket announced strong sales growth during July and August – outpacing rival Coles – and an 18 per cent rise in net profit to $1.1 billion.
More Australians than ever are investing, trading more frequently and looking beyond domestic equities. But how people think about the market depends very much on their age, according to a new CommSec report.
Free-to-air television generated just one quarter of Nine Entertainment’s operating earnings in the past financial year as Australia’s largest media company gains subscribers in its publishing arm and its streaming business Stan to lift earnings.
Three of the country’s biggest tourism players reported results yesterday, and the story, essentially, is that the war in Iran hammered the industry in the June quarter, in part thanks to Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways reducing flights to Australia, and things remain a bit problematic.
Almost every taxi ride in an Australian capital city will be driverless within a decade, predicts the Melbourne designer who created the world’s first purpose-built robotaxi.
Fear-o-meter
Cotality on the spring selling season:
As the weather starts to warm, green shoots typically begin to emerge in the property market. The spring and summer season historically sees vendor activity rise, with a surge in new listings and an increase in auction volumes following the winter lull, particularly in the southern states. This spring could prove to be cooler than the past, with potential vendors assessing a market with falling values, cautious and constrained buyers and an uncertain rates outlook.
Cotality tracks the listings of properties for sale across the country, a key metric that can provide high frequency insights into the interaction of supply and demand in the property market. Between early February and early June, new listings were broadly in line with the five-year average, with a noticeable spike in markets such as Brisbane and Adelaide during this period. This may have reflected vendors attempting to cash out after a windfall of capital gains at the peak of these markets.
The flow of new listings coming to market has faded since June, as the housing downturn becomes more geographically broad-based and the decline in values builds momentum. There were just over 33,000 newly listed properties in the four weeks to 23 August, 8.2 per cent below the average recorded over the past five years and 2.0 per cent below the weak levels seen during the same period in 2025.
Fear & Greed Q+A today
The second episode in our monthly series with Coinbase starts out as a crypto-trading 101, before exploring the idea of AI agents trading for investors:
“AI and crypto are kind of the two big technological waves of our time and they're intersecting quite rapidly. We at Coinbase are certainly working in that direction as well. Within AI, we've seen agents become increasingly more capable and powerful this year. And so one of the ways that we think about how to deploy agents for trading or capital markets is humans can only ingest so much information and can only be online for so long, but agents can solve that problem for us.
So we released this MCP where AI agents can actually connect with your Coinbase account and then you can give it certain guardrails for like a risk budget or certain trading positions that it can take on. And you can apply certain strategies for it and then it can basically go out on your behalf. But this is all kind of experimental and early stages and we're sort of releasing this in phases. But we do see that this is a very powerful technology that a lot of traders are excited to utilise more.
It's this theme of democratisation of technology. Things like high frequency and things like the strategies that hedge funds employ, they're basically flattening out as a result of agents coming online and just sort of ingesting this information across capital markets. And I think what we're seeing is people will be able to do these kinds of autonomous hedge funds that are kind of single-person entities, definitely in the next five years, but maybe even sooner.”
Inflation during July was higher than forecast, supporting arguments that the Reserve Bank will need to lift interest rates once again later in the year. The July headline consumer price index rose one per cent over the month and on an annual basis is running at 3.5 per cent, well ahead of the central bank’s target rate.
The all-important underlying rate rose to its fastest pace in a year, jumping 0.5 per cent during the month.
Housing remains the chronic driver of prices, with dwelling prices still rising, rents showing no signs of slowing and insurance costs increasing. Services inflation is again outpacing goods inflation and proving to be very sticky.
The RBA board minutes earlier in the week said that some members of the monetary policy committee were worried about upside risks, and yesterday’s figures immediately triggered speculation about another rate hike.
It might not happen immediately, or at least at next month’s board meeting because the RBA has time to watch and see. But bond markets are now pricing in a 100 per cent chance of a rate hike later this year, up from 70 per cent before yesterday’s numbers.
Greed-o-meter
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All eyes are on chipmaker Nvidia this morning, with the world's biggest company set to report its second-quarter earnings.