The ASX is heading for a nasty loss at the opening this morning after Wall Street bounced and bumped its way lower.
In fact trading on Wall Street ran out of puff – for the Dow and S&P 500 at least while the tech-heavy Nasdaq notched up a solid but unconvincing gain.
The Dow actually fell into the red in the final five minutes of trading and then climbed back into positive territory for an unconvincing close to the session.
The Dow ended with a gain of 0.13% or 35.2 points, ending at 27,816.90, the S&P 500 added 17.8 points or half a percent, to close at 3,380.80 and Nasdaq ended up 159 points or 1.42% at 11,326.51.
The volatile performance saw the ASX 24 overnight futures trade dip and remain in the red with a loss of 28 points at 5.30 am which had risen to a slide of 42 points at 6 am.
Driving the volatility was confusion over whether Congress would agree to a new stimulus package and President Trump’s apparent opposition. In fact, the gap widened between the Democrats and the Republicans yesterday on the massive trillion-dollar-plus stimulus package.
The day saw OK economic data reported with a 1% rise in consumer spending and a steadying in first-time jobless claim numbers around 873,000 for schemes run by the states.
But a further 650,000 people signed on to the separate federal scheme taking the total number to 1.49 million, underlining the need for a bit more stimulus spending.
The ASX200 finished the first day of the month and the quarter with a 57 point, or 1%, gain to 5872.9 on Thursday. But that fell massively short of the 2.29% slide on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the world’s third-largest stock market plans to resume operations today after a computer glitch forced the suspension of dealings on Thursday.
According to Reuters, TSE President Koichiro Miyahara said the exchange decided to suspend the full session because an early resumption could cause market confusion, but it planned to restart on Friday.
