Friday trade ended flat for the ASX as investors looked ahead to the closely-watched December US jobs report due out later in the day.
"A lot of good news has already been priced into sharemarkets," said Stephen Halmarick, chief economist at Colonial First State. "There is the risk of some fallback", if Donald Trump doesn't live up to the lofty expectations following his inauguration as US president on January 20.
The US dollar came under pressure while bonds rallied and stocks took a breather as punters took their feet off the pedal after drinking a lot of Trump cool aid. Telstra lifted more than 3 per cent over the week to a four-month high of $5.26.
The big banks did most of the heavy lifting on the benchmark index, led by a 3.2 per cent rise in ANZ, but the other three also all gained more than 2 per cent over the week. 1
In the States the release of December jobs data today revealed that the US labor market is robust and continues to display strength. The December jobs report indicated very respectable gains, with US payrolls adding 156,000 jobs to their balance sheets.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose about 65 points, with Goldman Sachs and Walt Disney contributing the most gains, and reached a new all-time intraday high. The Dow also came within 0.37 points of hitting 20,000 for the first time. The S&P 500 gained 0.35 percent and posted intraday and closing record highs, with information technology advancing 1 percent.
The Nasdaq composite outperformed, closing 0.6 percent higher, also hitting new all-time intraday and closing high. Leading the tech-heavy index higher were Apple and the so-called FANG stocks - Facebook,Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet.
"I think that part of the catalyst is this rotation into some of the sectors that had not caught the initial updrift" from the U.S. presidential election, said Daniel Deming, managing director at KKM Financial. 2
Oil traded higher on Friday as investors bought futures ahead of the weekend, but a strong U.S. dollar limited gains, as did lingering doubts about whether all OPEC producers would cut output in line with an agreement.
Trading was choppy, and market players cited end-of-week position-squaring and relatively low volumes during the first trading week of the year. 3 West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures settled up 23 cents at $53.99 a barrel, recovering from a session low of $53.32 and off a high of $54.32.
Gold off $8 @ $1172
HUI -3.5%
AUD Gold $ 1607
Even with today’s lower close, when we look at a weekly chart of gold, it is clear that the precious yellow metal finished stronger on the week, and exhibited weekly gains for the last two weeks. This lends credence to the assumption that recent lows in gold prices, which reached in intraday low of 1122 per ounce on December 15, of last year, concluded the multi-month correction that accelerated immediately following the presidential election last year. 4
AUD .7293
