daytrading june 26 afternoon

Thanks Gttrain.

Half-time round-up:

Australian shares have staged their biggest rally in a week and a half as overnight gains on Wall Street overshadowed a shaky morning for gold, Chinese shares and US futures.

At lunchtime the ASX 200 was 58 points or 1.25% higher at 4714 and on track to break a four-session losing run. A broad advance saw all sectors rise except gold (-1.5%), headed by gains in telecoms +2.3%, industrials +2% and consumer discretionary +2%. The rally followed moves by the People's Bank of China yesterday to cool strains in money markets. Interest-rate swaps pulled back from danger levels after the central bank pledged to provide needed liquidity.

"Policy makers are easing already and that's why one-day, seven-day and other market rates have come down this week," the head of China Research at HSBC told Fairfax. "They stopped taking away liquidity as a first step. If necessary, they will do reverse repos. They are not going to let interbank rates spike as they did last week. I don't think they want to see that again."

The Shanghai Composite resumed its downtrend this morning. The index was lately off 1.5%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng was ahead 0.63% and Japan's Nikkei off 0.85%. Dow futures were 49 points or 0.3% in the red.

Spot gold sagged $29.80 this morning to US$1,246.50 an ounce. Crude oil futures dropped 34 cents to US$94.90 a barrel. The dollar was buying 92.46 US cents.



Worrying signs in China. Shanghai is not following the script - been deteriorating all morning. If it keeps up, our market will likely head the same way gold is going right now. Hope no one was burned in the AZS profit binge. As Giz pointed out, there was steady buying in the days ahead of today's announcement and that's often a warning to be wary of bidding up the open. I lost a lot of money in my formative trading years that way. These days I'm more patient - squeezed a couple of points out of it on the way down. A good day for scalping off the lows - wins here in BBG, PDN and DML. Nothing spectacular but they add up.