Good morning and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog! I’ll be here to guide you through the latest developments these next few hours.<\/p>\n
The Australian share market is expected to begin its day slightly higher, according to ASX futures<\/b> (which are pointing to a 0.2% gain<\/b> in early trade).<\/p>\n
(Yesterday, the ASX 200 fell 0.7%, so it’s expected to claw back some of those moderate losses today).<\/p>\n
Several major companies will report their financial results today, including Santos, James Hardie <\/b>and Stockland<\/b>, which might affect the direction of the market \u2014 depending on how much they earnings exceed (or miss) expectations.<\/p>\n
In economic news, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand<\/b>\u00a0will announce its interest rate decision at 12pm AEST, and it’s widely expected to be a rate cut<\/b>. That would take its cash rate down 0.25 percentage points to 3%.<\/p>\n
Wall Street tech slump<\/p>\n
The local share market is expected to trade higher despite an overnight sell-off across Wall Street’s tech-related companies.<\/p>\n
The Nasdaq Composite <\/b>fell 1.5% to 21,315 points, while the S&P 500 <\/b>lost 0.6% to 6,411 points. The Dow Jones <\/b>index, however, was flat at 44,922 points.<\/p>\n
Some of the “big name” stocks which fell sharply were Nvidia <\/b>(-3.5%), Microsoft <\/b>(-1.4%), Amazon <\/b>(-1.5%), Meta <\/b>(-2.1%), Tesla <\/b>(-1.8%) and Oracle <\/b>(-5.8%).<\/p>\n
Despite today’s drop, the tech-centric Nasdaq index is still up 40% since its lows in early April, when US President Donald Trump spooked the world with his “Liberation Day” tariffs.<\/p>\n
So it might simply be a case of profit taking as there are concerns the big tech stocks (especially the ones which were propelled by the AI boom) are looking bit over-valued \u2014 or “priced to perfection” as market analysts like to say.<\/p>\n
There was also a significant fall in oil prices, with Brent crude down 0.9% to $US66 per barrel.<\/p>\n
Basically, it’s because traders are considering the possibility that upcoming talks between the US, Ukraine and Russia could potentially lead to sanctions on Russian oil being lifted (which would add more barrels to the already over-supplied oil market).<\/p>\n
Anyway, it might be a good time to grab a coffee. By the time you get back, I should have some more updates for you. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good morning and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog! I’ll be here to guide you through the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10370,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[208,3397,79,3396,212,18,1742,19,17,188,3393,9951,1084,1746,7222,211],"class_list":{"0":"post-10369","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-markets","8":"tag-asx","9":"tag-aud","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-dollar","12":"tag-dow-jones","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-gold","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-markets","18":"tag-nasdaq","19":"tag-oil","20":"tag-sp","21":"tag-sp-500","22":"tag-usd","23":"tag-wall-street"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}