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The ASX 200 is tipped to open 0.24% higher, with futures suggesting it will add 19.7 points up to 8,262 through Monday morning trade today.
The dovish sentiment comes after Wall Street turned around a five-session losing streak on the last day of the week; all three major indices ended up on Friday.
Perhaps unsurprisingly considering how often they’ve shaped as market leaders, it was heavyweight tech stocks doing the pulling again – Nvidia leapt as much as 4.4% while Super Micro Computer added a hefty 10.9%.
Tesla too was up 8.2% after record sales in its Chinese frontier in 2024.
Back home, the local bourse is slowly easing into 2025 trade; through to 8.10am Sydney time, not one company had published a price sensitive release.
By just before 9am, nearly two dozen had been shared by just under 20 companies.
All this is relatively unsurprising: January is usually a bit of a slower month Down Under as companies get back into the swing of things. Buying-wise things should trend decently; the year’s first month is positive 60% of the time.
Things are still moving though, with Goodman Group (ASX:GMG) among the early Week 2 topics: The property group has inked a super-sized deal in the U.S. to bring in a trillion dollar Norwegian sovereign wealth fund backer.
Nine Entertainment Co. (ASX:NEC) will also be closely watched on Monday after director Mandy Pattinson greatly increased her Nine stake by 40K shares.
We’ll get more key data this Wednesday too, with the ABS to release its monthly CPI data for December. Early forecasts have put inflation’s annual pace at around 2.2%, which would mean a 0.1% rise from November’s numbers.
While there’s no expectations this small move up will change the RBA’s rates decision on February 17 – it’s first 2025 policy meeting – it will no doubt be considered.
Other important data coming this week will include November’s retail sale stats.
Looking at forex, the Aussie dollar is buying 62.1 US cents.
To commodities, which are in the greenback,
Iron Ore has dumped 2.57% to sell at $98.30 a tonne in Singapore,
Brent Crude is trading at $76.51,
Gold is trading at $2,665 per ounce, and,
US natgas futures have dived 9.36% to $3.35 per gigajoule.
That’s Market Open, I’m Isaac McIntyre, stick with us for HotCopper’s Market Update.
