A broad sell-off pushed the share market underwater for the week as most Asian markets declined this morning.
At lunchtime the ASX 200 was 24 points or 0.45% weaker at 5322 with all sectors trading lower. Worst affected were gold stocks -4.8%, the Small Ords -1.2%, consumer discretionary -1.1% and industrials -1%.
The declines followed overnight falls on Wall Street as traders waited for confirmation that a recent dip in economic data owed more to tough winter weather than a loss of momentum.
"Investors are generally upbeat on the US but they want to see more evidence that the weakness in some of the recent data is due to a bad weather," Tohru Yamamoto, chief fixed income strategist at Daiwa Securities, told Reuters. "In short, there's nowhere to put money at this point."
China's Shanghai Composite held steady this morning, lately up 0.01%%. Hong Kong's Hang Seng lost 0.26% and Japan's Nikkei fell 0.56%. Dow futures were recently up three points or less than 0.1%.
Crude oil futures eased 11 cents this morning to US$99.28 a barrel. Spot gold was 70 cents firmer at US$1,311.90 an ounce. The dollar was buying 91.41 US cents.
A bit of a blah session. Markets are very much in wait-and-see mode. Still, there's nearly always something to buy. GFF gave a nice low-risk entry - one of my favourite range traders. Also took CAB when it looked overdone and bet that SKE will survive its first test of support at $2.70.
