Afternoon trading April 9

Thanks Oscar and morning crew.


Half-time round-up:

The ASX shrugged off Friday's trade-war bloodbath in the US to reach mid-session ahead as US futures hinted at a rebound tonight.

The ASX 200 turned a 17-point opening loss into an advance of 11 points or 021% at 5799 at 1pm EST as gains in defensive stocks outweighed falls in cyclicals. The best of the day's advances came in consumer staples +0.8%, health +0.9% and utilities +0.6%, while metals & mining lost 0.2%, energy 0.4% and materials 0.1%.

US futures kicked higher this morning as analysts downplayed the likelihood that the White House's proposed tariffs on Chinese imports will be enacted in their most extreme form. S&P 500 futures were recently up 11.3 points or 0.43%. The index dived 2.19% on Friday amid fears of an escalation in tit-for-tat trade measures between the US and China.

“This is not going to happen tomorrow, and given the mercurial nature of the US administration, the whole issue could well disappear before anything really happens,” Marshall Gittler, chief strategist at ACLS Global, told Reuters. “Many market participants may be starting to think that this is just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing in the end. But you never know: US trade policy is in the hands of someone totally unpredictable.”

Asian markets were mixed. China's Shanghai Composite shed 0.15%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng put on 0.54% and Japan's Nikkei dropped 0.36%.

Crude oil futures edged up 17 cents or 0.27% this morning to US$62.23 a barrel. Gold futures drifted up 50 cents or 0.04% to US$1,336.60 an ounce. The dollar was buying 76.84 US cents.



I spent most of the morning in places Endless warns me to avoid - the stock threads, AJX, etc. He was right. I scraped a pittance out of AJX, but the damage to my humanity from trying to make sense of the threads is unquantifiable.  I feel dirty. And not in a good way.