Thanks Shants and morning regulars.
Half-time round-up:
The share market is on track for its deepest two-session pullback in more than four weeks after weak overnight commodity prices and deteriorating business confidence data weighed on trade this morning.
At lunchtime the ASX 200 was eight points or more than 0.1% lower at 5516 and on track to extend yesterday's 25-point fall. Four weeks of steady gains leading into this week saw the index rebound more than 420 points off its mid-October low.
Shallow gains this morning in telecoms +0.7%, health +0.5%, property trusts +0.4% and industrials +0.3% were outweighed by falls in gold -4%, metals & mining -1.9% and energy -1.5%.
Business confidence withered last month despite a sharp improvement in trading conditions, according to NAB's monthly survey. While confidence eased to +4 from +5 in September, conditions surged to +13 from +1.
NAB downplayed the significance of the conditions reading: "Clearly the most surprising feature of the survey was the sharp jump in business conditions in October. While welcome, we remain cautious [about] the sustainability of the improvement. For example, it does not sit well with further falls in business confidence and only marginal improvement in capacity utilisation."
The mood on Asian markets remained positive following yesterday's news that investors will be able to trade mainland Chinese stocks on the Hong Kong exchange. China's Shanghai Composite rallied 0.9%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng 0.46% and Japan's Nikkei 0.7%. Dow futures were recently up one pointsor less than 0.1%.
“The US market just wants to go higher as earnings have been strong and we’re probably not going to get higher interest rates at least in the next six months,” Evan Lucas, market strategist at IG, told
Bloomberg. “That’s conducive for higher asset prices. The Shanghai-Hong Kong connect is a very positive event that will allow more foreign funds to flow into China.”
Crude oil futures fell another 35 cents this morning to US$77.36 a barrel. Spot gold rebounded $7.50 to US$1,155.10 an ounce. The dollar was buying 86.45 US cents.
Today's candidate for the annual 'Leakiest Ship on the Exchange' award is ENT. The share price tanked from 8.6c on Friday to 5c yesterday before the company admitted this morning that they had some dud drill results to announce. Current SP: 4.3c. Holders should be asking questions. Trading: RSG offered a nice entry in the opening 'sell gold' panic. WEB gave the sort of attractive bounce opportunity that used to be fairly common a few years back until the instos began padding the buy queues. MNS would also have been profitable with a decent fill.
PS Mitta, any chance you can launch the afternoon thread tomorrow? The power company is going to shut me and the rest of this town down at 8.30am tomorrow, so I can do the pre-market launch but then I'm off-line until after the market close. Back to normal on Thursday.
