What a difference a day makes – this time on Monday the local market was on the brink of a solid start with the ASX 200 futures market showing a 34 point gain – and the market followed suit with the index up 15.9 points.
This morning the overnight futures market is showing a small singe point loss for the actual market ahead of its re-opening later in the morning.
On top of that the Aussie market will have to come to grips with a sharp fall in iron ore prices on Monday to well under $US60 a tonne (The foreign exchange market ignored that and pushed the Aussie dollar to around 76.90 US cents this morning).
Iron ore prices tumbled fell under $US60 per tonne on Monday October 30 in the wake of new restrictions in Tangshan province imposed on sintering and pelletising facilities (processing iron ore for blast furnaces) due to a forecast deterioration of air quality.
The Metal Bulletin’s 62% Fe Iron Ore Index dropped 2.2% to $US58.75 per tonne down $US1.33 a tonne. The 2.2% slide matched the fall for all of last week.
A big turnaround in sentiment on Wall Street didn’t help as sentiment moved from Friday’s bulls’ roar, especially over big tech stocks, to a more sedate, worried slide as investors worried about the stability of the Trump administration and the progress of its tax cut package which could take longer to fully implement (to soften the cost to the budget).
Wall Street after Bloomberg reported that the US House of Representatives was considering phasing in a cut to corporate taxes, rather than enacting them immediately, as investors had been hoping.
As a result, the Dow fell 85 points, or 0.4%, to 23,349, the S&P 500 was off 8.3 points to 2,573, a drop of 0.3%, while the Nasdaq ended 2.3 points lower to 6,699m(after its 2.2% surge on Friday).
That was despite a 2.2% rise in the price of Apple shares to end the session at $US166.72 – that was after the shares briefly touched a new all time high of $US168.07 in early morning trading. Apple was worth more than $US861 billion at the end of the day. It reports its 4th quarter results Thursday (Friday morning Sydney time).
