Good Afternoon and welcome to HotCopper’s The ASX Today for Tuesday, Week 11, I’m Jon Davidson, and at least we’ll only need to worry about fuel around $2/L as yesterday’s historic oil rally receded just as quickly as it arrived. At the time of recording, Brent Crude’s around US$92 a barrel. Still higher than where anybody not selling it would like, but not as bad as the price of $110 we saw yesterday.
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The broader ASX appears to have realised it might have lost its head a little yesterday; at one point on Monday, trades in the XJO dipped down over -4% before then recovering back to a negative -3% readout.
Today? We’re up over 1%, though at the time I wrote this script, we’ve dipped back below 8,700 points after hitting 8,750 not far out the gate.
Big story put simply? Still a lot of risk and uncertainty, but things are looking slightly better than they were this time yesterday.
Overnight, Trump said any further attacks from Iran on neighbouring nations’ oil infrastructure would lead to more bombing, and the U.S. President even said the operation is ‘nearly complete.’ That appears to have reassured some, for now.
Looking elsewhere around the traps, tech continues to flash green, especially Life360 and Weebit Nano, though not as strongly as they did on Monday when traders were looking for safe places to tuck cash that didn’t ride the waves and tides of oil. That tech safe harbour can be seen in the XTX index overall: it’s up nearly two and a half percent over the last week, though, still down over -16% YTD.
Blood plasma giant CSL Ltd also climbed as investors look for safety too in the established healthcare and biotech stocks; though, that isn’t evidence of a larger trend – after its earnings scalping, CSL is still down -42% the last twelve months.
Elsewhere, Rio Tinto was up over a percent as materials stocks bounced back, though there was, apparently, one headline overlooked by the market – the Mongolian government is unhappy with Rio Tinto’s management of its Oyu Tolgoi mine in the country, one of the world’s largest copper projects.
Mongolia wants Rio’s annual fee to be phased out, it wants better loan terms, and Mongolia has threatened to raise the export tax on copper if it doesn’t get its way. Add that in with BHP’s ongoing hostile negotiations with China lately, and you’ve got some pretty interesting stuff going on in the big miners.
Finally, one interesting note to chew on: Morningstar analysts say REA Group, which owns flatmates.com and property.com, say that the company is at risk of being an AI victim as Agentic AI could more easily re-create its website.
We could be about to see a U.S.-style wave of AI replication panic filter down under, too, though that remains to be seen right now. At least going back to the AI culture war would feel more normal than an actual war.
That’s The ASX Today for Tuesday, I’m Jon Davidson, have a great evening.
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