ASX Market Open: Local bourse to trade red; markets still nervous | 8 August 2024

Good morning and a happy Thursday. The ASX200 is set to trade red with futures indicating a drop of -0.5%.

That follows a red night for Wall Street with the NASDAQ down more than -1% and the S&P 500 down -0.77%.

Clearly, markets are still a touch nervous.

Copper prices also hit a five-month-low overnight; a lot of people appear to have missed the fact the year to date copper rally has basically been erased in the last two months.

What this means for the litany of microcap explorers pivoting into copper, as well as our larger miners, remains to be seen – but it doesn’t look too good when you also consider extended weakness for the iron ore price.

Speaking of commodities, iron ore is at $100 per tonne in Singapore and brent crude is at $78.50 per barrel after it jumped on US stockpile drawdowns. Gold is travelling at $2,383 per ounce and US natgas futures read $2.09 per gigajoule – all those prices in USD, of course.

In forex, the AUD is buying 65 US cents.

That’s Market Open, I’m Jonathon Davidson, and we’ll be with you later in the trading session for an update.