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Good Afternoon and welcome to HotCopper‘s the ASX Today for Wednesday of Week 9, I’m Jon Davidson, and as the AI company behind the AI scare trade last night told US software businesses to open their hearts to collaboration, we’ve seen some jitters in the market fall back.
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Cue a good day for the ASX after a green night on Wall Street. As at around a quarter past one in the afternoon Sydney time, the XJO travelling along at 9,120 points up just over 1%.
We got one big datapoint down under today: Australian inflation increased 3.8% in the twelve months to January, with electricity prices up 32% over the same period. Makes you wonder why the RBA cut at all, but the market shrugged it off.
Looking back to Wall Street, yesterday I spoke of how the AI scare trade had come to overpower the impact of softer than expected US inflation, as well as weaker than expected GDP growth last week. All anybody could talk about was where tech stocks are headed.
That mightn’t remain the case for long. Last night we saw Anthropic, which produces the ‘AI Agent’ Claude product behind all of the panic, throw a promo event where the company sought to carry out some damage control.
So far, it’s worked. A leading US software stock ETF went green overnight, though, still remains down off relatively recent levels. That leaves the other big issue: the US tariff situation.
What interests me most about the Supreme Court tariff ruling is how the Shanghai stock market is faring. At the time of preparing this script, the Shanghai Composite index up seven tenths of a percent, its second green day in a row.
Having come out of the Lunar New Year break yesterday, it’s interesting to see China reacting in this way – suggesting investors may perceive Trump’s trade war with China may wind back, though, whether it’s just regular Lunar New Year bullishness remains to be seen.
At any rate, Wall Street up overnight, Shanghai up yesterday and today, the Nikkei up 1.4% at the time of recording, it’s a good mood in the room among Asian markets.
At home earnings season rolls on, and so let’s take a look around the traps.
Wisetech jumped +10% as it released earnings, reaffirmed guidance, and of course, benefitted from a recovery in fears around software stocks overnight.
Elsewhere, Woolworths surged +11% on an earnings report that has pushed the supermarket giant to a market cap of nearly A$43B; it said full year profits will come in higher than expected.
Elsewhere, it didn’t release earnings, but Pilbara Minerals or PLS Group as it’s now called jumped over +3% as lithium benchmarks notched upwards once again, feeding back into the shares of lithium miners. That excitement even apparently fed into uranium stocks for no real reason.
That’s the ASX Today for Wednesday, I’m Jon Davidson, have a great night and we’ll see you tomorrow.
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