A warning from NAB about souring loans and a weakening global economy pressured banking stocks this morning and helped pull the Australian market off yesterday's 14-month high.
At lunchtime the ASX 200 was down five points or 0.1% at 4554 after earlier falling as low as 4538. Declines in financials -1.1%, gold -1.3% and health -0.6% were largely offset by rallies in telecoms +1.2%, energy +1% and materials +0.5%. Shares in NAB fell 3% after the bank increased provisions against bad loans and said its fourth-quarter earnings would be flat.
"The Australian economy remains comparatively strong but lower global growth expectations, divergence in business conditions across sectors and low levels of consumer and business confidence have reduced the outlook for economic growth in 2013," NAB said in a statement quoted on Fairfax. “Furthermore, in the last three months, conditions in the UK have deteriorated, and economic recovery is likely to be slower than previously expected."
"The sentiment with banks has become very fragile now," Damien Boey, an equity strategist at Credit Suisse, told Fairfax. "Our banks are primarily exposed to Australian housing, which really hasn't shown over past years any major sign of weakness, but now is showing some real sign of distress."
Asian markets were mixed as tech stocks were hampered by last night's earnings miss from Google. Shanghai eased 0.01%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng advanced 0.2% and Japan's Nikkei lost 0.26%. Dow futures were recently down one point.
Crude oil futures recouped 11 cents this morning at US$92.07 a barrel. Spot gold was $1.80 softer at US$1,740.40 an ounce. The dollar was buying $US1.037.
This market has little interest in going lower and it's making gun traders of all of us. Count yourself lucky if you're new to the game because conditions don't get much more accommodating than this. Well done to the PNN winners. I had a nice mix of straight-forward intraday pullback scalps this morning and short-term buys for next week. The former included NTU (nice), CGF (okay) and TAS (out for brokerage). The latter included first dabbles in DYL and CNX on pullback, hopefully holding for rebounds next week.
