ASX today – Australian shares are (for once, at least) ignoring what Wall Street is doing heading into Friday morning, moving towards a +0.4% gain in futures even as many U.S. investors head for the hills to end the week.
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While most global investors generally liked what they saw from the “amazing” talks between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, U.S. trade dumped.
The S&P 500 and Dow Jones shaved as much as -1%, while the Nasdaq composite caught the full flak of the day and dropped -1.57%. In comparison, London’s FTSE and Japan’s Nikkei both (slightly) ticked the other way.
Some may be a little hesitant to truly accept that Trump and Xi have found an avenue to trade war peace, considering no real agreement is actually on the table, but Washington did say it would cut some tariffs, and Beijing is now preparing to keep critical rare earths flowing as its positive answer.
That helps some Oz companies, both ways, which helped our trends. A largely positive earnings season has also been helping.
And on that, let’s get into some company news.
ASX stocks to watch
First up, Lynas Rare Earths (ASX:LYC) director Amanda Lacaze has warned that any government-backed rare earths projects will face steeper costs because she expects China to deliberately “starve” Oz projects of needed equipment. “There are associated cost penalties,” she explained.
Coles (ASX:COL) and Woolworths (ASX:WOW) remain W44 watches, too; both supermarkets shared milquetoast results, seeing Coles drop as much as -4% through yesterday. Woolies had some hope, though, up +3%.
Also in reporting, dual-listed ResMed (ASX:RMD) saw a 9% increase in first-quarter earnings, to US$1.3B, even as it preps a U.S. manufacturing expansion.
Lots of AGMs are inked in for Friday, too, including meets for Fortescue (ASX:FMG) and Vulcan Steel (ASX:VSL), as well as CAR Group (ASX:CAR), Skycity Entertainment (ASX:SKC), Steadfast Group (ASX:SDF), and Ioneer (ASX:INR).
Quarterlies: Origin Energy (ASX:ORG) and Capstone Copper (ASX:CSC).
Private sector credit stats are at 11.30am today.
Buck and ore
Now – in forex, the Oz dollar buys 65.5 U.S. cents.
Looking at commodities, all in the greenback,
Iron Ore shaved -0.7%, at $106.45 a tonne in Singapore,
Brent Crude is down -0.4% at $64.67/bbl,
Gold has retaken $4K heading into the weekend, and is at $4,029 an ounce, and,
US natgas futures have run +6.3% higher, to $4.05 per gigajoule.
That’s HotCopper’s Market Open, I’m Isaac McIntyre – good luck, happy trading.
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