Daytrading December 18 afternoon

Thanks Brit and morning crew.


Half-time round-up:

Australian shares pared two days of gains as Asian markets swung lower on overnight weakness in commodity prices and soft US equity futures.

At 1pm EST the ASX 200 was trading 16 points or 0.3% lower at 5086 but on the improve after falling as low as 5027 in early action. The partial reversal was led by the consumer discretionary sector +1.1%, consumer staples +0.5%, telecoms +0.5% and industrials +0.4%.

Resource stocks were the biggest drag after crude oil hit a seven-year low overnight and gold a six-year low. The gold sector sagged 3.9%, metals & mining 2.9% and materials 1.8%. The energy sector bucked the trend with a rise of 0.3%.

"Equity markets are beginning to know their enemy - the continued sell off in energy prices," IG analyst Angus Nicholson told Fairfax.

US equity futures extended falls this morning after the S&P 500 gave up 1.5% overnight. Dow futures were recently down 30 points or 0.17%. China's Shanghai Composite slid 0.08%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng 0.64% and Japan's Nikkei 0.45%.

Crude oil futures eased six cents this morning to US$34.77 a barrel. Spot gold rebounded $5.30 to US$1,054.80 an ounce. The dollar was buying 71.29 US cents.


Nice recovery this morning, considering the overnight leads. Suggests a degree of optimism that the rally over the last two sessions will resume next week. US futures have been pretty useless lately as a mood indicator at this time of day - so much so that you could just about use them as a contrarian indicator. Trading: cracking rebound trade in ASB in the first few minutes of the sort that used to be much more common before the instos learned how to stack buy queues. (That sort of trade - where support broke, prices collapsed, then recovered quickly - made up about two-thirds of my income during the first half of the last decade.) Squeezed a couple of pips out of AZS and added a speculator in MEU.