By Stan Choe
The Australian sharemarket has made a positive start to the session with mining companies leading the way.
The S&P/ASX 200 was up 16.6 points, or 0.2 per cent, in early trade, with six of 11 industry sectors in the green. Materials is the best-performer while tech shares are the heaviest weight on the index.
Tech giants continue to steer Wall Street’s fortunes.Credit: Bloomberg
Financial stocks are mixed. Commonwealth Bank, the biggest stock on the bourse, lost 0.5 per cent in early trade to increase the pain on investors still smarting from Tuesday’s sharp fall. National Australia Bank lost 1.4 per cent while ANZ Bank was up 0.5 per cent and Westpac edged 0.1 per cent higher.
Mining stocks climbed. Rio Tinto jumped 1.7 per cent, Fortescue gained 0.8 per cent and BHP added 0.5 per cent while there was more cheer for the gold miners as the price of the safe haven continued to strengthen. Northern Star rose 1.4 per cent and Evolution Mining jumped 2 per cent in early trade.
Energy stocks advanced after oil prices climbed overnight. Santos rose 1.3 per cent while Yancoal and Woodside Energy each added 1 per cent.
Tech stocks slumped, with Life360 losing another 10 per cent after slumping on Tuesday following a trading update while Xero shed 1.9 per cent and WiseTech lost 0.9 per cent.
The Australian dollar was trading at US65.31¢ at 10.22am AEDT.
Overnight, the S&P 500 added 0.2 per cent after erasing a loss taken during the morning. It’s been bouncing around lately, coming off Monday’s vigorous rebound following its first losing week in four.
The Dow Jones rallied 559 points, or 1.2 per cent, to a record, surpassing its prior all-time high set two weeks ago. The Nasdaq composite lagged the market, though, as Nvidia got back to falling amid continued concerns that stocks caught up in the artificial-intelligence frenzy may have become too expensive. The Nasdaq dipped 0.3 per cent.
Helping to lead the market was Paramount Skydance, which jumped even though the entertainment giant reported revenue and profit for the latest quarter that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations.
It was the company’s first earnings report since Skydance closed its acquisition of Paramount in early August, and investors appeared to be encouraged that it raised its cost-cutting target to at least $US3 billion ($4.6 billion) from the previous $US2 billion. Its stock leaped 9.8 per cent.
Close behind was FedEx, which climbed 5.4 per cent after it increased its forecast for profit in the current quarter. Instead of expecting growth from just the summer, the delivery company now also expects profit to rise in this year’s holiday-shopping season from last year’s.
They helped pull the S&P 500 back within 0.6 per cent of its all-time high, which was set two weeks ago.
They also helped offset a 3 per cent drop for Nvidia, which is Wall Street’s most influential stock because of its massive size.
A major investor in Nvidia, Japanese technology giant SoftBank, said it had sold its entire stake in the AI chip company for $US5.83 billion last month. SoftBank is not giving up on AI. It’s still focusing on OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
A big question on Wall Street has been whether investors will push the frenzy around AI stocks further. Their sensational growth has been one of the top reasons the US market has hit records despite a slowing job market and still-high inflation. But their prices have shot so high that critics say they’re reminiscent of the 2000 dot-com bubble, which ultimately burst and dragged the S&P 500 down by nearly half.
CoreWeave, whose cloud platform helps customers running AI workloads, fell 16.3 per cent even though it reported a smaller loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
Back on the winning side of Wall Street, BigBear.ai rose 6.1 per cent after reporting better results for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It also said it would buy AskSage, a generative AI platform built for national-security agencies and other highly regulated areas, for $US250 million.
All told, the S&P 500 added 14.18 points to 6,846.61. The Dow rallied 559.33 to 47,927.96, and the Nasdaq composite slipped 58.87 to 23,468.30.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rose in Europe following a mixed finish in Asia.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1 per cent even though SoftBank climbed 2 per cent. Besides the sale of its Nvidia stake, the tech giant also reported a much bigger profit than analysts expected.
In the US bond market, trading was closed for the Veterans Day holiday.
Most Viewed in Business
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
