Week 9 CY26, Wrapped: Shanghai shrugs off 15% tariffs; XJO hits 9,200pts for first time; earnings end

I talk a lot on HotCopper about “tariff fatigue” – I’ve mentioned it heavily on the podcast, in interviews with business leaders, and I’ve spent plenty of time writing (typing) the words on a page.

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And we probably couldn’t have asked for any better evidence than what the Shanghai Composite did this week. Now, a caveat: I acknowledge that we’ve just come off the back of Lunar New Year, and that the LNY holiday tends to correlate with a period of bullishness.

At the same time though, I think it’s telling the Shanghai Composite has had three green days in a row following Trump’s move to reinstate a global tariff floor of 15% after the US Supreme Court last week found the Administration’s tariffs to be invalid.

So what does that tell me?

Chinese investors don’t expect the status quo to change. I doubt any of them expect Trump to give up on the tariffs outright if there are further SCOTUS decisions poking holes in the tariff regime; but it says to me that investors don’t expect anything to get worse.

So, just more hot air really, is what I take the perception from Chinese investors to be.

It probably doesn’t hurt China has made some pretty big AI headlines in recent history – Alibaba released its Qwen3 model and there’s rumours that Chinese companies have been training AI using NVIDIA chips, which they aren’t supposed to be, but how do you actually control that?

ASX200 hits fresh all time high

Anyway, tariff fatigue, loud and clear.

The same thing is true for us (even though earnings season is part of that story) – the ASX200 hit a fresh intraday record this week, hitting 9,200pts for the first time and logging a record close on Friday not far off that level.

It’s good to see: I made the call in an article last week I expect the XJO to hit 9,450pts by the end of the year, so hopefully that comes true (and hopefully by December I remember having made that call ten months earlier.)

The other big news of the week: earnings is over! We’ve seen some pretty hectic swings, with Zip Co being the most memorable – if not Commonwealth and BHP swinging upwards. You can find coverage on the website!

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