Pre - market Trading August 23rd

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen,

Futures have our market opening slightly up after a slight drop in the Dow overnight. Gold was off just a whisker at $1338.28 USD and Brent Crude was hovering around yesterdays close at $50.88. The Aussie Dollar was trading firmer and was most recently seen at 76.276 cents.

Reporting season dominated locally yesterday and is set to do so again today. Its been an interesting start to the week with former market pariahs Fortescue and Bluescope in the beaten up iron ore and steel sectors posting big increases in net profit. FMG increased its dividend whilst Bluescope held its flat to continue its focus on debt reduction. Meanwhile everyones market darling APN Outdoor felt the full wrath of Olympic Gold Medal starved investors and had over 26% of its market cap ripped from it for an expect 5 or 6% drop in profit. CEO Richard Herring blamed the Olympics and the Election for starving it of its usual transactions and felt the outlook remained strong whereas the market maintained its right to have doubts. One thing is for sure, their dividend yield just got a whole lot better as they upped their final by 44%to 6.5 cents fully franked. Its sharemarket rivals followed it down. Could be an opportunity here for a recovery play but given some of the scorchings investors have copped from standing by troubled companies in recent years they now seem a bit prone to ripping the head off things first and then examining them later. Might be a sector to watch.

Jan Yellen is still standing over markets with her threat of higher interest rates(someone should take a stick .....) but the speccy end saw a few good runners again yesterday. Been a few multi day runners of late outside the gold sector that have managed to hold most if not all of their gains. You still have to find them but they're definitely there.

All the base metals were down last night with Zinc the least and Lead the most.

Good luck everybody.

RJ