The Australian market is heading for a break out start to trading this week when the ASX re-opens this morning.
While the local market lost 13 points in choppy trading on Friday, the stellar session on Wall Street on Friday night saw the ASX 200 futures market add 34 points by the close early Saturday.
That was after eurozone shares rose 0.3% on Friday, (despite a sharp fall in Spanish shares), and the US S&P 500 surged 0.8% led by tech stocks on the back of strong earnings results.
The Nasdaq bolted more than 2% higher to a new record high thanks to big gains by Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.
More than 130 S&P 500 companies are down to report this week in the US, while in Australia local investors will be looking closely at the National Australia Bank’s full year profit on Thursday.
Eurozone shares rose 0.3% on Friday, despite a sharp fall in Spanish shares, and the US S&P 500 surged 0.8% led by tech stocks on the back of strong earnings results. Reflecting the positive global lead ASX 200 futures gained 34 points or 0.6% pointing to a strong start to trade for the Australian share market today
Records continue to fall in US markets which saw global share markets enjoy a buoyant work, thanks to solid earnings (especially among big US techs) and economic data.
The decision of the European Central bank to extend its quantitative easing for another year at least also helped sentiment.
US shares rose 0.2% with strong gains in tech stocks, especially on Friday. Eurozone shares gained 1.2% helped by the ECB decision, Japanese shares rose 2.6% as Abenomics continues following the Japanese election and Chinese shares gained 2.4%.
Australian shares fell 0.1% not helped by political uncertainty at the end of the week after the High Court’s citizenship decision and the botched raid on the AWU.
Bond yields rose in the US and UK but fell elsewhere. While iron ore prices fell more than 2% over the week, oil prices rose, copper was easier and gold was again weak (See separate story).
The $US had its biggest week of 2017 so far and Friday saw that sharp 0.4% gain on strong US data on third quarter GDP (see separate story) and the decision by the ECB.
Back home the weaker than expected Australian September quarter CPI inflation saw the $A fall below US0.77 to around 76.77 – down 2.6% over the week – and at levels last seen in July.
Wall Street ended strongly on Friday with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite closing at records on Friday, thanks to those big gains in tech shares in the wake of the better-than-expected quarterly results from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet. and Intel Corp.
This week it’s the turn of Apple and Facebook to grab attention.
The S&P 500 rose 20.67 points, or 0.8%, to 2,581.07, with most of the gains coming from the technology sector, which rose 2.9%. The index added 0.2% over the week, rising for the seventh consecutive week, its longest positive weekly streak since late 2014.
The Dow added 33.33 points, or 0.1%, to end at 23,434.19. The Dow index gained 0.5% over the week, the seventh straight weekly gain.
And the Nasdaq Composite surged 144.49 points, or 2.2%, to 6,701.26, for its best percentage gain since November 7, according to US data group, FactSet. The index rose 1.1% over the week, its fifth consecutive weekly gain.
