Market Open: ASX futures point to green day but anything could happen

Good morning and welcome to the start of Week 41 of the year.

The local share market is set to open higher on Monday though it depends where you look – standard ASX futures suggest a rise of +0.4% while Weekend Australia 200 futures closed flattish red.

All major indexes on Wall Street closed green on Friday, which implies that we’ll likely follow, so at least there’s that good news.

That said, Wall Street’s sentiment gauge is still on ‘fear’ and Australian investors are increasingly nervous about bond yields – the US10Y is effectively at 5.3% and our own is at the same level.

Whether this impacts the thinking of investors on Monday remains to be seen – sometimes they matter, sometimes they don’t.

Not many big moves in commodities with Weekend US oil futures showing slight growth implying some minor upside to Brent Crude; that Yemen’s government have taken a stand against its own locally-contained Houthis may be prompting some geopolitical trading behaviour.

(Also worth noting: the gap between Brent Crude and US WTI is currently quite large at US$102 vs US$91/bbl respectively.)

There’s also an election in Brazil that’s likely to impact that country’s share market but it very quite probably won’t affect either the oil price or the ASX.

Looking around the traps: blood giant CSL Ltd has made moves to advance its development of rare kidney and liver disease treatments; Brightstar Resources has announced a 167m drill hit at 2 grams per tonne of gold extending mineralisation at Sandstone; Buru Energy‘s Rafael project has been referred to WA’s EPA for approval and Brazilian Critical Minerals have picked up a new processing plant.

Good luck in the day ahead and we’ll be with you again mid-afternoon for ASX Today.

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