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The New York Yankees face some competition from the St. Louis Cardinals and others in the sweepstakes for a young international outfielder.

Carmakers eventually learn the same lesson. The market that made you can also trap you. Build your entire business around one country, and you inherit that country’s slowdown, whether you earned it or not.

That is the trap China’s auto industry has spent this year trying to escape. Retail sales in the world’s biggest car market slumped 24% in August to 1.54 million units, and year-to-date sales are down more than a fifth, Bloomberg reported, citing China Passenger Car Association data.

For BYD (BYDDY), the damage at home is specific. Domestic sales fell 32.72% to 1,505,755 vehicles through August, dragging total sales down 6.84%, according to data compiled by CnEVPost.

Tesla (TSLA) has been running a version of the same play from Shanghai, shipping cars out of a market where its share keeps eroding. Exports have quietly become a pressure valve for both companies, which makes the monthly ranking of who is actually shipping the most a useful scoreboard.

Then came the Wednesday, Sept. 9, export ranking. BYD claimed 35.4% of China’s passenger new energy vehicle, or NEV, exports in August, while Tesla China dropped to fourth with 7.0%, according to China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) figures published by CnEVPost.

That is not a gap. That is a different weight class.

China’s August export rankings: BYD vs. Tesla China

BYD exported 183,746 passenger NEVs in August, up 130.8% from a year earlier and 5.8% from July. Its share climbed from July’s 32.2%.

Tesla China exported 36,119 vehicles, down 45.5% month over month. Its share fell from 12.3% in July, knocking it from third place to fourth behind Geely and Chery.

Related: BYD just answered the question Tesla keeps fighting in court

Stretch the frame and the picture holds. Through the first eight months of 2026, BYD shipped 1,126,797 NEVs abroad for a 33.9% share, against Tesla China’s 331,443 and 10.0%.

One wrinkle is worth naming, because most coverage blurs it. BYD’s own reported overseas sales for August were 189,466 vehicles, a larger figure than the CPCA export count, because it includes cars built at plants outside China.

When I ran both series side by side, the divergence between them is the story: The gap widens every time BYD opens a factory abroad.

BYD export share hits 35.4% as Tesla China falls to 4th.- / Getty Images

Why BYD’s 2027 target changes the math for Tesla

BYD now expects to sell more than 2.5 million vehicles overseas in 2027, a target disclosed in a Deutsche Bank research note after management’s post-earnings call, CnEVPost reported.

Management also lifted 2026 overseas guidance to between 1.9 million and 2.0 million vehicles. That target started the year at 1.3 million and was raised to 1.5 million in March.

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Read that sequence twice. A company does not raise the same forecast three times in nine months because demand is soft.

The constraint was never buyers. Management said shipping capacity held volumes back this year and that sales would have been higher with enough ships, according to the Deutsche Bank note. BYD is answering with a bigger dedicated carrier fleet and more local assembly.

Its Indonesian plant is producing. Brazil is ramping toward annual capacity of 300,000 vehicles. Hungary is expected to begin assembly in November or December.

Local assembly matters more than the tonnage. A car built in Hungary is not an export. It is a European car, and it sidesteps the tariff structure Brussels built specifically to slow Chinese shipments. Management is evaluating additional overseas plant locations.

The overseas margin story investors keep missing

Volume without profit is just expensive market share, and that has been the honest bear case on BYD for two years running. The export numbers finally complicate it.

Profit per vehicle sold overseas ran about 20,000 yuan, or roughly $2,950, in the first half despite currency headwinds, management said on the call. The company expects that figure to stay broadly stable near term, with volume gains offset by dealer network buildout and new factory ramp costs.

Here is how quickly the overseas base has compounded:

242,765 overseas NEV sales in 2023

417,204 in 2024

1,046,083 in 2025

1,162,260 through August 2026

More than 2.5 million targeted for 2027, according to Deutsche Bank’s research noteSource: CnEVPost

What struck me in my analysis is the shape of that curve against Europe’s demand backdrop.

Battery-electric cars took 20.7% of the European Union market in the first half of 2026, up from 15.6% a year earlier, ACEA reported. BYD is scaling into a market that is still expanding, not fighting for a fixed pie.

What this means for your portfolio

If you hold Tesla, none of this is a thesis-breaker on its own. It is a clarifier.

Tesla’s valuation has not been a bet on selling the most cars for some time. It is a bet on autonomy, energy storage, and robotics arriving fast enough to matter. Every month BYD widens the export gap, that bet gets more concentrated, because the fallback of “Well, it still sells a lot of cars” gets thinner.

TheStreet has tracked how BYD’s volume wins keep arriving with margin caveats attached, and how the price war at home has hollowed out its own profitability. Those caveats have not vanished.

BYD still faces European tariffs, local-content pressure, and political scrutiny in half the markets it is entering. Battery supply is another live constraint. Shortages of the second-generation Blade Battery are not expected to clear until the first quarter of 2027, with an order backlog of about 250,000 flash-charging-compatible vehicles waiting behind them.

So the risk is real. And it is no longer just the risk of a company that cannot find customers.

That distinction matters for anyone holding either stock in a retirement account rather than trading it. A company fighting for demand can be fixed with a better product. A company fighting a rival that has both cheaper cars and more factories on more continents is a slower, more structural problem, and it tends to show up in guidance long before it shows up in a quarterly print.

Watch the monthly CPCA export ranking rather than the quarterly delivery headlines. It updates faster, it strips out the domestic price war, and right now it is the cleanest read available on which of these two companies is buying itself more time.

Related: China’s BYD sets audacious goal: Overtake Toyota by 2030

“I’m concerned that my card issuers might freeze or flag the cards when they suddenly see an extraordinary number of transactions.”

Retirement planning often starts with decades of saving, followed by a plan for how much to withdraw each year. That plan usually assumes that spending will remain fairly steady throughout a 30-year retirement.

The Schwab Center for Financial Research recently flagged changing spending needs as one of three retirement challenges that catch most people off guard.

Spending needs can shift meaningfully across a 30-year retirement, the firm cautioned, driven by longer-than-expected retirements, unexpected healthcare costs, or stronger portfolio returns. 

A Financial Planning Review study suggests that the flat-spending assumption can be costly for retirees who follow it without adjustments.

The gap between what plans assume and how retirees tend to spend creates risks on both ends, from unnecessary belt-tightening to avoidable shortfalls.

What Schwab’s spending warning gets right and what it leaves out

Rob Williams, Senior Wealth Management Executive & Strategist and Former Head of Wealth Management Research at Schwab Center for Financial Research, framed the core challenge in direct terms. 

“You can make educated guesses, but they’re just that — guesses,” Williams said. “And that makes it difficult to know if your money will last long enough.”

The firm’s February 2025 analysis details how those same forces can upend initial spending projections over a multi-decade retirement.

Williams recommends updating a comprehensive retirement income plan at least every few years, if not annually, so small misalignments get caught before they become costly.

The firm’s framework flags that spending will change, but it does not map the specific direction or shape those shifts tend to follow over 30 years.

That dimension is what the Financial Planning Review study now provides, with data challenging the flat-budget models that most retirement plans still use.

Blanchett’s research maps the spending curve retirees tend to follow

David Blanchett, Head of Retirement Research at Prudential Financial, published a study in the Financial Planning Review in June 2026.

Using data from the RAND Corporation’s Health and Retirement Study, the paper found that average retiree spending follows a U-shaped “smile.” Median spending, however, follows a “smirk,” declining without a late-life uptick.

Financial Advisor Michael Stein popularized the three phases behind the curve. The first is the “go-go” years, when retirees spend freely on travel and hobbies.

During the mid-retirement “slow-go” years, which is the second, activity levels and discretionary costs both decline, pulling total spending well below the early-retirement baseline.

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In the third “no-go” years, rising medical costs push total spending back up, creating the upward turn that completes the shape of the smile.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the 2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey reinforce this pattern, showing that consumer units with a reference person 75 or older spent about $55,800 in 2024.

That compares with roughly $100,300 for the 45-to-54 age group, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 2025 data. 

“…Spending tends to decline in real terms, even among those who have the resources to potentially spend more,” Blanchett concluded in the study.

Retiree spending often follows a three-stage curve.alvaro gonzalez / Getty Images

How the spending curve changes the withdrawal math

The withdrawal rate implications of planning around a spending curve instead of a flat line are considerable, the study found.

Blanchett tested three models, each assuming a moderate level of income risk aversion, and the differences were significant across all three.

Both the smile and smirk models supported initial withdrawal rates roughly 20% higher than the flat-line assumption, the study found.

Morningstar’s retirement income research reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle.

Christine Benz, Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning, said retirees who adopt flexible withdrawals can afford a higher starting rate.

“Don’t just take that 3.9% and run with it,” Benz said. “You probably can and should enlarge your spending if you are willing to be flexible.”

For a retiree with a $1 million portfolio, that gap translates to roughly $10,000 to $12,000 in additional first-year spending from the same savings.

Healthcare costs anchor the late-retirement spending spike

Blanchett acknowledged in his study that healthcare expenses remain a “clear wild card” when projecting income needs during the final stretch of retirement.

A 65-year-old retiring in 2026 can expect to spend $185,500 on healthcare and medical costs over the full span of retirement, Fidelity reported.

That estimate rose 7.5% from the prior year’s figure of $172,500, underscoring the pace at which late-life medical costs continue to climb.

Shannon Benton, Executive Director of The Senior Citizens League, has warned that Medicare Part B premiums consistently outpace Social Security cost-of-living adjustments. 

The gap, she said, gradually erodes seniors’ quality of life, with members reporting that their benefits are failing to keep up.

The late-life medical surge forms the right edge of Blanchett’s spending smile and highlights a gap in flat-budget planning that most traditional models overlook.

What spending-curve planning means for retirees

Blanchett’s findings point to two areas where flat-budget plans misalign with actual spending.

The go-go years support a higher withdrawal rate than most models permit, and the late-life medical surge Fidelity projects at $185,500 demands a dedicated reserve that flat budgets never carve out.

The annual plan reviews Williams recommends at Schwab become more pointed when retirees know which phase of the curve they are entering.

Planning around the curve rather than a fixed line can support a higher starting withdrawal rate, Blanchett’s data shows, but the math only holds when early spending freedom and the late-life cost spike are treated as two sides of the same budget.

Related: Schwab warns of a retirement risk easy to overlook

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Stock futures edged higher as Wall Street awaited the August consumer price index.

The CPI, due at 8:30 a.m. ET, measures the average change in prices paid by consumers for a basket of goods and services and is a key gauge of inflation.

Economists polled by Dow Jones expect consumer prices to rise 0.4% in August from the previous month and 3.4% from a year earlier, while core CPI is expected to increase 0.2% on the month and 2.4% annually.

The data will be closely watched for clues about the Federal Reserve’s next interest-rate move.

Stocks finished lower for the fourth day in a row on Thursday, pressured by rising oil prices and Treasury yields. August’s producer price index, a gauge of wholesale inflation, rose 0.4% on the month and 5.4% from a year earlier.

Oil prices were easing in premarket trading, but Brent crude was still trading above $104 a barrel.

Kyle Rodda, senior financial market analyst at Capital.com, said comments from President Donald Trump that he sees the war ending after the U.S. midterm elections “sparked concerns that the US is preparing for a war that will carry on in its current form at least until the end of the year.”

“Surging oil prices sparked a significant move in rates and fixed-income markets, with the knock-on effects responsible for a fall in stocks and a sharp plunge in precious metals,” he said.

“The 2-year yield jumped by around 15 basis points to a more than two-year high, with rates markets ramping up the implied probability of a Fed rate hike next week to about 70%.”

Rodda said the market moves come ahead of crucial CPI data that could help determine whether the central bank hikes rates next week or holds off.

Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate’s front-month contracts edged lower on reports of plans for diplomatic talks between Gulf states.