Afternoon trading June 6

Thanks Oscar and morning crew.


Half-time round-up:

A third day of gains saw Aussie shares turn positive for the week as the prospect of further rate cuts continued to lift global sentiment.

The ASX 200 rallied 39 points or 0.6 per cent to 6398, just above the 6397 level where it opened on Monday.

Technology was the pick of the sectors. Wisetech jumped to a record high after updating investors about its operations. Shares in the software logistics specialist - one of the so-called WAAAX group of leading Aussie tech stocks - were lately up 6 per cent at $25.73. A business update from Afterpay was less well-received. APT shares fell 3.3 per cent.

Aside from tech stocks, there was a defensive bias to today's move, with utilities, property groups and health stocks among the main drivers. Property manager Charter Hall Group was one of the index's best performers, rising 4.5 per cent to a post-GFC high. The company was part of a consortium that this week announced it had acquired a strategic interest in the Australian Unity Office Fund.

Goodman Group gained 2.9 per cent and Abacus Property Group 2.5 per cent. Sonic Healthcare and Cochlear both added 2 per cent.

Oil companies fared better than expected after crude officially entered a bear market overnight. (A bear market is defined as a decline of at least 20 per cent from a peak). Texas oil futures fell $1.80 or 3.4% to $US51.68 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange overnight. That extended oil's decline from its peak of $66.30 in late April to 22 per cent. Analysts attribute the collapse to a combination of rising inventories and fears for the outlook for demand as Donald Trump wages trade war on several fronts.

Aussie oilers have been under pressure for weeks and took the latest development in their stride. Santos bounced 2.3 per cent, Beach Energy 0.8 per cent and Woodside 0.1 per cent.

Further down the foodchain, Highfield Resources jumped 26.5 per cent after announcing Spain's government had granted an environmental permit for the company's flagship potash development near Pamplona.

The morning's major economic news - April trade data - had little impact. The trade surplus came in at $4,871 million, down from the $4,949 million March surplus and short of the consensus forecast of $5,000 million.

Wall Street laid the foundations for today's rally with a night of solid gains after Fed Chair Jerome Powell paved the way for a rate cut in the U.S. The S&P 500 put on 0.82 per cent.

Asian markets struggled to gain traction. China's Shanghai Composite slid 0.5 per cent, Hong Kong's Hang Seng edged up 0.2 percent and Japan's Nikkei managed a rise of 0.3 per cent. S&P 500 futures in the U.S. rose a point or less than 0.1 per cent.

Turning to commodity markets, crude oil futures bounced 20 cents or 0.4 per cent this morning to $US51.88 a barrel. Gold futures were steady at $US1,333.80 an ounce.

On currency markets, the dollar was buying 69.7 US cents.

Trading: following on from some of the, ahem, robust discussion this morning I wanted to make a general point about trading: the only way to survive in this game is to own your mistakes. Why? Because you deny yourself the opportunity to learn if your losses are always someone else's fault. The only way to grow as a trader is to make mistakes, own them, study where you went wrong and learn from it. It's the only way to improve. And it's horrible. It hurts to lose money and the natural human reaction to pain is to flee. Blaming someone else is one way of doing that. Taking ownership means immersing yourself in the hideous pain of your decisions. It's horrible but necessary. The pain is part of the lesson. The good news is that by embracing it, you eventually get better at evading it by making better decisions. Successful traders expect to have losses - it's part of the cost of doing business. They protect themselves by cutting losing trades quickly. Having that mindset - expecting to lose money sometimes - helps make it easier to cut losses before they blow out. My biggest losses all came on sure things where I was able to convince myself the market was wrong. Nope. The market listens to our certainties and laughs. Eventually I learned we're in the probability business here, not the certainty business. Get the mindset right and everything else falls into place.