Iron ore continues on its latest surge higher – jumping 3% to $US58.70 a tonne, from its close last Friday of $US57.00 a tonne.
It was the eighth straight rise in a row and prices are now up around 25% from the 10 year low of $46.70 hit earlier this month.
The overnight rise means another bounce in prices of local iron ore miners such as BC Iron, Mt Gibson Iron and Fortescue Metals after a strong run over the past fortnight.
Fortescue, which has been heavily shorted by big hedge funds (as a way of taking a negative view on China) had its strong day’s trading yesterday, jumping 16% celebrated its best day of trade in three years on Monday, surging 16.3% to a two-month high.
It’s now 31% above the low it hit on April 13.
Shares in BC Iron has doubled in a week, while Mt Gibson’ shares are up 15%.
The rise in global iron ore prices will support our market today as it pushes towards the 6,000 point level on the ASX 200.
The overnight futures market had the index up around 17 points.
The ASX 200 and the All Ordinaries Index each rose 0.8% yesterday to 5982.7 points and 5954.8 points respectively.
There will be no lead from Wall Street which turned negative in the final hour of trading ahead of Apple’s expected quarterly report. Markets in Europe had earlier risen strongly.
The Dow lost 0.2%, the Nasdaq, 0.6% and the S&P 500 just over 0.4%.
Apple reported after hours, with the shares jumping sharply on what was a very solid report with higher revenues than forecast by the market, higher earnings, a lift in dividend and a buyback.
The shares, which had risen to $132.65 on normal trading, jumped more than 2% in after hours trading.
Apple reported a 27% jump in revenues from the March quarter in 2014 to $US58 billion (FactSet forecasts were around $US56 billion).
Net profit for the quarter was $13.6 billion, up 33%, thanks to a 40% jump in iPhone sales to 61.2 million units in the three months to March.
“We’re seeing a higher rate of people switching to iPhone than we’ve experienced in previous cycles, and we’re off to an exciting start to the June quarter with the launch of Apple Watch,” said Apple CEO in a statement this morning.
Apple also said that it would expand its dividends and buyback scheme to return a total of $US200 billion to shareholders by the end of March 2017, up from the $US130 billion target set a year ago. That increase includes a 11% dividend increase and a further $US50 billion in buybacks.
However, the iPad remained a weak spot in Apple’s line-up with sales of 12.6 million, below expectations.
