Afternoon trading October 19

Thanks Oscar and morning crew. Shout-out to Cleo - look after yourself.


Half-time round-up:

A partial recovery mid-session pushed the ASX towards its first winning week in three as the big banks rallied for a fourth day.

The ASX 200 slashed an opening loss of 59 points to 20 points or 0.3% at 5922 at the halfway point. The benchmark index needs to close above 5896 to break its weekly losing streak. Defensive gold stocks were the pick of the sectors, rising 1.4%. The financial sector edged towards a gain of 0.1%. Keeping the market in the red were declines in I.T. stocks -1.2%, health -1% and materials -0.7%.

Wall Street suffered another heavy sell-off overnight following a near-3% dump on China's main market yesterday and lingering concerns about the impact of higher rates. The S&P 500 shed 1.44%. S&P 500 futures were recently ahead 8.75 points or 0.32%. China's Shanghai Composite declined 0.3%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng 0.63% andJapan's Nikkei 1.36%.

“The combination of slower global economic growth, ongoing US-China geopolitical/trade concerns and the increased likelihood the FOMC [US Federal Open Market Committee] raises the funds rate by more than is currently discounted (75bps over the next 12 months) is weighing on investment sentiment,” Elias Haddad, senior currency strategist at CBA, told CNBC.

Crude oil futures bounced 35 cents or 0.51% this morning to US$69 a barrel. Gold futures edged up $1 or 0.08%to US$1,231.10 an ounce. The dollar was buying 71.06 US cents.

Been an extraordinary week for spec runners. Not sure how long it can go on. It's a stretch to say the entire Australian biotech space was grossly undervalued by several factors. What tends to happen after a few days is a lot of the 'hot' retail money gets trapped at higher levels as the pros exit. People get cynical and skint, participation drops off and the pros move on to another lurk. Some of the air has come out of the first few bolters, but BIT and ANP have held up pretty well, considering the scale of the rallies, so I don't think we're not done yet. Some Fridays I'm ready for the weekend - not this week. Bring on next week. I swung and missed ANP in the opening flurry. Traded lows in MEM twice for two wins.