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Good Afternoon and welcome to HotCopper’s Market Close for Wednesday, I’m Jon Davidson.
It wasn’t tariffs that pushed down the ASX today, at least not directly. Instead the US inflation read overnight, with core inflation more or less at 3%, rattled rate cut bulls, as signs of tariff inflation start trickling in.
And a core read of around 3% means that it hasn’t really budged that much in twelve months – that’s the signal to take note of. A mixed batch of Chinese data yesterday also failed to pump more locally-minded risk-on sentiment into the market.
Looking at sectors, IT led the gains throughout the day; and for much of intraday trades, everything else was in the red – and that was the case heading into the final half hour with materials and financials down the most. The latter may be because Wall Street bank earnings overnight didn’t cause too much hype.
Turning to companies in the green,
Lumos Diagnostics spent much of the day as the ASX top gainer after it won a contract worth around half a billion dollars Australian to provide its fingerprick bacterial infection blood test to a US medical distributor.
Li-S Energy, meanwhile, working on battery tech to keep drones in the air for longer, also stayed in the green intraday after appointing a US-based firm called Paladin to handle government relationships when it comes to the American defence market.
Finally, an ever-volatile Brainchip was back in the green intraday after NVIDIA’s recent performance which showed it still has what it takes to keep all of Wall Street afloat.
Now let’s turn to the reds,
South 32 once again in trouble intraday following power supply concerns at its Mozambique aluminum project after UBS today downgraded the stock per its investment analysis methodology.
Elsewhere, Newmont Corporation joined the reds as the gold price slumped overnight, though, with that intraday slump not coming close to harming overall longer-term performance, it will likely be seen as a signal to scoop up more shares for many.
Finally, former energy darling candidate TMK Energy also joined the reds on Wednesday as momentum wore off following recent upside borne from disclosure around its Mongolian gas fracking project, where the company has been plugging along for years.
That’s Market Close for Wednesday, I’m Jon Davidson, have a great night and we’ll see you on Thursday.
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