Greetings and welcome to HotCopper’s the ASX Today for Thursday of Week 21, I’m Jon Davidson and for the second time this week, things are looking a little better. The ASX200 was up not far off 2% gains for the day at the time of recording as three big factors come together to inject optimism into the market down under.
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The first is that overnight we got a fresh earnings report from NVIDIA and we’ve thus seen evidence the AI trade is alive and well, injecting optimism into Wall Street and thus the rest of the world. The microchip AI giant has boosted its dividend to 25c, which is an easy way to win favour, but it did the trick alongside record revenues over $80B in the greenback and net cash greater than the market cap of many ASX100 stocks.
Whether one should be concerned about the dividend boost was lost in another positive headline from the US overnight: Trump has yet again made fresh claims the US and Iran are nearing finalisation of peace talks, and for now, the market has decided to believe it.
At home, too, some local data further helped the share market: unemployment in Australia hit 4.5% last month, seemingly in opposition to projections from the RBA that unemployment would be 4.2% in June and thus inspiring some to divine there’s now less chance of a rate hike in Australia, which would be good news for the banks, mortgageholders, and probably gives the government something positive to talk about that isn’t the budget. Good news all round.
On the back of all this, Brent Crude fell overnight and gold’s gone up, though the former still hovers above $100 a barrel USD, so not out of the woods yet, but there’s very obviously a better mood at home today. And so what’s happening around the traps?
We’ve had another fresh IPO hit the bourse today and that’s SkinKandy which at the time of writing is above its IPO price and seeing fairly good liquidity, as for how the company fares in the weeks ahead is another question. SkinKandy runs skin piercing clinics predominately on the east coast and is now eyeing an international expansion. The question is, can it differentiate itself from piercing clinics the world over.
Commonwealth meanwhile up around one and a half percent heading into mid-arvo as unemployment data implications boost bets on the Big Yellow bank, and meanwhile BHP jumped over 3% as gold prices recovered, as well as copper, even while iron ore fell in Singapore.
Finally, Israeli chip tech company Weebit Nano jumped over +13% in afternoon trades after NVIDIA’s report overnight; that company has quickly become a tech darling and is perhaps the next Wisetech when it comes to stocks that cause excitement.
That’s the ASX Today for Thursday, I’m Jon Davidson, have a great night and we’ll see you tomorrow.
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