Thanks Trees, Cornelius, Shantaram and anyone I've missed who started a thread this morning. Lol.
Half-time round-up:
Australian shares rallied for a second day after China's economic data met expectations, helping the big miners pare losses following a production update from BHP.
At lunchtime the ASX 200 was trading 33 points or 0.6% ahead at 5421 as beaten-up I.T. stocks bounced 2.4%, the energy sector rallied 1.1%, industrials 1% and financials 0.5%.
The metals & mining sector bounced off an eight-session low after the noon release of Chinese economic data. Gross domestic product for the first three months of the year grew 7.4%, in line with expectations but down from growth of 7.7% at the end of last year. Retail sales increased a better-than-expected 12.2% last month from the same month last year, but industrial production and fixed asset investment fell short of economists' predictions.
"China is decelerating but in the near term crisis is unlikely," Dariusz Kowalczyk, strategist at Credit Agricole, told Bloomberg. "They can control the situation because the government is cash rich and the risk of a major downturn is very containable. We are fairly confident that there’s enough time for China to revive growth by the end of the year and they will reach their target."
The dollar rallied more than a third of a cent following the Chinese data. The Aussie was lately buying 93.59 US cents.
China's Shanghai Composite was little changed, lately up 0.01%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng gained 0.43% and Japan's Nikkei jumped 2.24%. Dow futures were recently up 61 points or nearly 0.4% following positive reactions to after-market profit reports from Yahoo and Intel this morning.
Spot gold dropped $4.10 this morning to US$1,298.30 an ounce. Crude oil futures eased a cent to US$103.83 a barrel.
Chinese traders appear less enthusiastic about their economic data than Australia, but US futures are looking perky. The general reaction to China seems to be polite yawns because on balance it was all fairly close to expectations. Yawning would also be a reasonable reaction to my morning. Been trading the dips in NEA between technical outages. Failed to find anything else of interest. Lean pickings once again.
