Staff writers
Updated ,first published
The Australian sharemarket has broken a severe case of Mondayitis.
Over five weeks leading up to April 20, the local bourse has closed lower in four out of five Monday trading sessions (excluding the Easter Monday holiday on April 6). At the beginning of each week, the sharemarket slid lower as negative news over the preceding weekend from the US-Israeli war with Iran leached confidence.
But this week was better. The market’s key index, the S&P/ASX 200, on Monday closed marginally higher, up 6.4 points, or 0.07 per cent, to end the day at 8953.5. It was a positive result despite another weekend of escalating tensions in the Middle East.
By late afternoon, the Australian dollar was trading around US71.58¢.
Oil and natural gas prices soared on Monday once trading resumed. Brent jumped as much as 7.9 per cent, erasing most of its declines on Friday. European gas increased as much as 11 per cent.
That put pressure on energy stocks, which were the biggest weight on the index. Viva Energy slumped sharply after trade resumed for its shares for the first time following the fire at its Geelong refinery.
The petrol and diesel refiner released an update saying it expects production will ramp back up to 90 per cent of its maximum output within weeks, but investors had marked it down 9.09 per cent by the end of day. Assessments conducted over the weekend confirmed the blaze was confined to the alkylation unit, which converts gases into a component needed in petrol, the company said. Other major processing units in the petrol-production complex were unaffected.
Among Viva’s pears, Woodside Energy lost 2.93 per cent, while Santos shed 1.31 per cent and Ampol slumped 3.19 per cent.
The local market was on course for a strong Monday opening after Wall Street rallied hard last week as investors leant into Iran’s statement it had opened the Strait of Hormuz.
The cheer to turn to fear when the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on Sunday shut out shipping again from the crucial waterway. The strait is closed while a US blockade on Iranian ports remains in place, a move Iran maintains violates the terms of a ceasefire agreement.
US president Donald Trump responded with threatened strikes on Iranian power plants and bridges overnight if a deal is not reached before the ceasefire deadline this week.
“The market’s still carrying a risk premium into the deadline but just not fully committing to it,” said Haris Khurshid, chief investment officer at Karobaar Capital in Chicago. “If things just continue as they are, you probably see a gradual push higher to around $US105–$US115, but with a lot of back and forth on headlines.”
Financial overall moved higher, although National Australia Bank slumped 3.6 per cent after it revealed it would lift its first-half credit impairment charges by $300 million, the result of “fuel supply and cost issues” related to the Middle East conflict, taking its total charges to $706 million.
About half of the increase, roughly $152 million, reflects the higher likelihood of a worsening economy, while the bank has also lifted provisions to recognise “potential stress which may emerge.”
Commonwealth Bank closed 1.08 per cent higher, Westpac rose 0.73 per cent, and ANZ Bank was flat.
Mining stocks slid, with the big iron ore miners all lower. Rio Tinto lost 0.71 per cent, BHP was down 0.41 per cent and Fortescue 0.28 per cent. Gold stocks gained. Despite early falls, Evolution Mining ended 1.77 per cent and Northern Star rose 0.34 per cent.
Tech stocks were mixed. WiseTech (1.49 per cent) and Technology One (1.1 per cent) lost ground, but Xero was higher (0.21 per cent).
The stand-off over Hormuz – through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flowed before the US-Israeli war on Iran began at the end of February – threatens to deepen the global energy crisis and is undermining Trump’s weekend prediction of a quick end to the conflict. The waterway is just one of the unresolved issues, which also include Iran’s nuclear capabilities and Israel’s ongoing invasion of Lebanon.
Before the latest developments, Wall Street’s S&P 500 leapt 1.2 per cent to an all-time high and closed out a third straight week of big gains, its longest streak since Halloween. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged as many as 1100 points before paring its gain to 868, or 1.8 per cent. The Nasdaq composite climbed 1.5 per cent.
Several times since the war began, optimism on Wall Street has quickly deteriorated into doubt about a possible end to the fighting. That in turn has caused vicious and sudden swings of prices for everything from stocks to bonds to oil.
A strong start to the earnings reporting season for big US companies has also helped support the US stock market, and more financial companies joined the list delivering bigger profits for the start of 2026 than analysts expected.
With AP, Bloomberg
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
