Thanks Oscar and morning crew. Half-time round-up: A sell-off in...

Thanks Oscar and morning crew.


Half-time round-up:

A sell-off in the big banks after a trading update from WBC helped push the ASX into the red for the week on a second day of declines.

At 1pm EST the ASX 200 was 55 points or 1% lower at 5488 for the session, nine points lower for the week. A 1.8% dive in the financials sector did much of the damage. Also weak were gold -2.3%, energy -1.4% and telecoms -0.9%. Trading positive were IT +1% and consumer discretionary +0.8%. The decline in the energy sector followed a third losing session for crude oil overnight.

“The biggest risk to the market at the moment is a huge drop in oil prices,” James Woods, strategist at Rivkin Securities, told Bloomberg. “We’ll see some near-term weakness in the coming weeks. Investors are likely to be buying on these dips as central bank policies remain supportive of equities.”

China's Shanghai Composite was barely changed at +0.09%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng similar at +0.03%. Trade on Japan's Nikkei was suspended for a public holiday. Dow futures were recently ahead ten points or 0.05%.

Crude oil futures declined another 30 cents or 0.72% this morning to US$41.41 a barrel. Gold futures were $2.80 or 0.2% softer at US$1,349.10 an ounce. The dollar was buying 77.2 US cents.


Can we all just agree to have a holiday and come back when the Olympics are over? I got excited yesterday when the market threw up a few opportunities, but it seems to have gone back to sleep this morning. If there were opportunities, I was looking at Rio at the time. Took a tentative dab at AMP, but can't pretend it has played out profitably as yet. Sellers in control. Bounce, damn you, ideally before my dental appointment.