Greetings and welcome to HotCopper’s the ASX Today for Monday of Week 9, I’m Jon Davidson, and I wrote in last week’s wrap for Week 8 that the ASX200 had fared quite well as Trump stayed unusually quiet last week.
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Well, that’s no longer the case, and a new wave of tariff threats and fears perhaps feels more familiar. The U.S. Supreme Court deemed Trump’s tariffs illegal last week, or at least, the law he’d been hoping to use to validate them was deemed invalid. So Trump has since declared a new 15% tariff for the whole world, and it’s entirely unclear what that means for countries with existing deals to secure different rates.
The big tell will be what China’s stock market does when the country exits the Lunar New Year break tomorrow, and it’s unclear what might happen to the ASX if Shanghai decides to go for a contrarian jog.
While Wall Street had a modest green Friday last week and Europe followed, the ASX turned green out the gate, though it didn’t last.
And while South Korea’s stock market hit a fresh record earlier today, with China and Japan both closed on Monday, it’s a little harder to know where the ASX may head; U.S. futures were firmly red mid-afternoon today, at least.
Futures for the NASDAQ were down nearly -1% and the S&P 500 down three-fourths of a percent. Not helping matters is that U.S. GDP data came in lower than expected last week, too; the country’s housing market is slowing, and freight volumes across North America are at levels not seen since CY08.
In what could be happier news, we get the latest NVIDIA earnings out of the U.S. this week, which will be pivotal for the software-stock-tech-AI sell-off panic. In the background, Bitcoin down below US$65K; gold back up over US$5,160/oz.
Turning our eyes back home, Austal (ASX:ASB) fell over -11% intraday on Monday as analysts at Citi questioned whether the robust numbers in Austal’s latest earnings are reliable seeing as the company had to downgrade estimates around two weeks ago after revealing its in-house accountants had double-counted a contract; offsetting that though was a $4B contract from Canberra last week, but the analyst in question had concerns there too. That news spread fast; Deloitte auditors also said they couldn’t verify Austal’s earnings projections.
Elsewhere, Electro Optic (ASX:EOS) surged over +17% as it released its earnings, this despite the fact it made a loss in CY25, twice as large as that in CY24. Mexican food chain Guzman Y Gomez (ASX:GYG) jumped back nearly +10% on no news after its earnings last week came in showing a slower rate of growth than what the company had hyped the market to expect during its IPO; finally, Minerals 260 (ASX:MI6) jumped +23%; the latest smallcap on the ASX to see a re-rate chasing gold higher.
That’s The ASX Today for Monday, I’m Jon Davidson, have a great night.
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