Market Close: ASX outage hurts 80 companies as bourse struggles in arvo trade

Good Afternoon and welcome to the start of Week 49 I’m Jon Davidson. I’d say here’s to a happy December, but you might be among shareholders caught up in today’s ASX announcements outage, the latest bungle to come from the bourse operator, presumably stemming from decades-old software that has now caused many issues.

Some eighty companies were affected, including IGA owner Metcash who had to apologise their way through an investor presentation, as well as HotCopper client Buy Now Pay Later fintech Ovanti Limited, which was also hurt by the outage today as far as planned newsflow goes. 

Not a great look for Helen Lofthouse’s ASX which nearly exactly a year ago saw trading suffer an outage, at least today, shares appear to be buying and selling like they’re supposed to. The ASX was set for a flattish green day, but this bungle appears to have locked in a flattish red day; the XJO was down point four percent at 2.30pm Sydney time.

In sectors, energy and materials led the gainers though not by much; health care leading laggards again after both CSL Ltd and Sigma Healthcare, now owner of Chemist Warehouses, also fell. 

But what about companies in the green? 

Unico Silver and a basket of other silver miners jumped on Monday as silver prices continue to travel along with gold prices which are again tracking upward, giving goldies hopes we could see another bullish month.

Woodside Energy up over 1.2% heading into the final hour on the back of stronger oil prices as Brent Crude notched a small overnight gain, with OPEC production cuts offsetting what looks like a possible Ukraine-Russia peace plan deal. Keyword possible. 

Finally, BHP Group up nearly +1% in the latter part of arvo trades as weakness in CBA appeared to trigger some rotation into CBA; iron ore futures on the SGX also saw an uptick intraday Monday. 

And what about the reds? 

Treasury Wine Estates was slammed on Monday after flagging an impairment in its US business which basically boils down to TWE having overpaid in CapEx, that’s a blow because its Chinese sales remain subdued and what it doesn’t need is fresh trouble in another market. 

AUB Group meanwhile fell close to -20% on Monday after a key takeover partner walked away from proceedings, leaving a bitter taste in shareholders and investors mouths, most likely particularly bitter for those who bought in recently. 

Finally, both Digico Infrastructure REIT and its part backer HMC Capital fell into the red on Monday as heat appears to dissipate off those data centre-exposed stocks which last week juiced on ABS data showing a data centre spending boom down under.