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It was a day not without its big-name earnings from the likes of Bubs (ASX:BUB) and Woodside (ASX:WDS), plus others.
But it was’t just newsflow determining prices on Wednesday.
Take the case of JB Hi-FI (ASX:JBH) which has hit a fresh record high on Wednesday, crossing over the $100/sh mark.
That upside appears to be borne from a brokers’ note released today by Citi whacking a $101.60/sh price target on the stock. The investment bank rated the e-goods retailer a “Buy.”
Analysts at Citi reckon household spending will be strong enough through the second half of FY25 to keep momentum going and, presumably, deliver a nice annual report.
Brokers cited “upside risk” – similar to what UBS said today about the domestic residential construction sector.
What about NEXTDC?
Elsewhere, Trump’s policy platform has started to benefit certain stocks over others.
Take a look at Australian data centre leader NEXTDC (ASX:NXT).
Data centres have become synonymous with AI. No longer is the oil and gas skyscraper the real emblem of modern power – it’s data centres. Especially if it’s powerful enough to chew through the gigawatts needed to power ‘AI’ applications.
And towards the construction of more such assets in this world has Trump hurtled sentiment headlong with his unveiling of plans for US$500B in spending on data centre construction.
NEXTDC jumped 2.15% to nearly $16.10/sh on Wednesday, wiping off some recent losses. What exact benefit it could extract from Trump’s splurge remains to be seen.
Called the ‘Stargate’ project, spearheaded by OpenAI and Japan’s SoftBank (and surely named by Musk,) this is Trump’s plan to ensure the USA remains the AI leader.
$500B for what, exactly?
In short, it’s just a bunch of data centres, with a lot of exciting language being thrown around. But really it’s just infrastructure spending.
Just ignore estimates the internet (by way of requiring ever more power generation to sustain data centres) could already represent 7% of all emissions on Earth.
But we’re back under a Trump-led America, and you know what that means: who cares about ESG (read: climate change) when billionaires can move to Mars?
(As an aside, if you can meaningfully predict how much it would cost to recover a corpse off Mars, send me an email.)
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