Glenn Dyer, Author at ShareCafe

A weak week for the US dollar and it helped commodities end on a solid note generally.

Diary: US Jobs, RBA Meets, Earnings Season

It’s another one of the those first week’s of the month conjunction of events and data for markets to fret over.

Local Reporting To Pick Up Pace

Australia’s June 30 (full year and half year) profit reporting season steps up this week with around 15 major companies reporting.

Apple Report To Dominate US Earnings

More than 130 companies on the S&P 500 are due to report this week as the June 30 quarterly season starts slowing – but one of those will be the most important of them all for market confidence – Apple.

ASX Set For Better Start After Friday’s Slide

The ASX will be looking for a modest recovery today from Friday’s nasty sell off after the futures market ended the week early Saturday with a gain of 24 points on the day.

Amazon Earnings Miss

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos briefly became the globe’s richest man when the company’s shares moved further over half a trillion value on Wall Street, moving past Microsoft’s Bill Gates.But Amazon shares eased in late trading and he was back to second spot, according to Forbes magazine.

Fortescue Lowers Costs As Production Steadies

Australia’s third iron ore miner, Fortescue Metals Group is still talking cost cutting as it maintains production guidance for 2017-18 at 170 million tonnes – little changed than the 170.4 million shipped in the year to June this year.

Restructuring GUD Narrows Losses

A second successive annual loss GUD Holdings after the sale of two businesses in the 2016-17 June year slashed $58.9 million from the company’s bottom line.

Impairments Derail Aurizon

Shares in the rail group, Aurizon absorbed the news of yet another round of massive impairments and write downs yesterday, with the shares up 0.2% to $5.06, leaving them lower than when they started 2017 at $5.12.

Macquarie Rails Against Bank Levy

Macquarie Group says it expects to make another annual profit of around $2.2 billion despite the impact of the federal government’s new bank levy, and it made sure shareholders at yesterday’s annual meeting heard a lot more about the iniquities of the levy and less about the group’s performance.

Can The Times Maintain Its Momentum?

Thursday (Tonight US time) is going to be a big day for the New York Times and for legacy print media companies – there’s the company’s second quarter financial figures that will be released (late tomorrow night, Sydney time), with analysts looking for another solid quarter for subscriptions and a small profit or loss.

Facebook Beat Lifts Wall St

No wonder the US stockmarket hit new highs overnight Wednesday and will continue upwards tonight.

RBA Boss Talks Down Global Policy Shift

Reserve Bank Governor Phil Lowe, has made it clear that what foreign central banks did with their monetary policy settings didn’t drive the Reserve Bank and force it to follow.

Kiwi Regulator Blocks Suncorp Bid For Tower

Suncorp is facing a multi-million dollar loss after its takeover of Tower Insurance was blocked by the NZ competition regulator, the Commerce Commission.

Local Inflation Remains Aloof

No chance of an interest rate in Australia for a year or more judging by the way inflation sagged in the June quarter (as it did in New Zealand, the UK,US, Japan and Europe), making a mockery of all the headless chickens who have been jumping on the ‘rate rise looms’ story in the past month simply because the US Federal reserve is putting up rates and some analysts completely misread a comment from Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank.

Fed On Hold, Flags Balance Sheet Tightening

As expected the US Federal Reserve left its key interest rate unchanged, but signalled that it could start shrinking its huge $US4.5 trillion balance sheet from the next meeting in September.

Mixed Report Card For Oz Minerals

On the face of it the latest quarterly report from Oz Minerals had good news – the company looks like its on track to meet this year’s guidance for gold and copper production, the company is well advanced on its expansion at its Prominent Hill mine in South Australia, work on the new mine at Carrapateena, also in the state, is well advanced, and the company lifted its cash holdings back past the $600 million mark.

Blackrock Ups Stake In Local Shares

The cost of Blackrock’s investment surge into the Australian top 200 companies has now topped the $A12 billion mark in the past 18 months with 5% plus stakes now identified in at least a 10 companies, in addition to huge stakes already held in the likes of BHP and Rio Tinto.

Weather Curbs Wesfarmers Coal Production

On the pure figures of higher production and prices for coking and thermal coal, Wesfarmers is looking at a big rebound for its resources business for the year to June 30, but there are couple of small bombs that could see the business incur a smaller than expected profit, or even a loss.

Western Areas Rebounds On Production Update

Western Areas shares had a rare (for 2017) rise in price yesterday after releasing an encouraging June quarter and 2016-17 production report.

Super Retail Rebrands Amart Into Rebel Stores

Investors gave Super Retail Group a big thumbs up yesterday for deciding to rebrand its 65-store Amart sporting goods chain as the more upmarket Rebel making a total chain of more than 150 outlets.

IMF Eyes Firmer EU Growth

Trump bump definitely gone and the International Monetary Fund says the global economy will now depend on recovering euro economies (but not the sliding UK) and a rebound in China, which will drag higher the economies of the rest of the region, including Australia.

Wary AFIC Maintains Dividend As Profit Eases

The largest listed investment company, Australian Foundation Investment Co, has maintained final dividend at 14 cents a share and the full year payout to shareholders to an unchanged 24 cents a share as it reported a slightly better than expected result for the year to June 30.

Lihir Lifts Newcrest Production

Newcrest Mining believes its flagship Cadia mine in New South Wales will resume full operations before September 30, as the company continues to spend on repairing damage caused by a small earthquake on Good Friday in April.

OPEC Moves To Boost Compliance On Cuts

Oil prices rose Monday following news that Saudi Arabia says it will cut its crude exports starting next month and Nigeria agreed to cap its output once it has climbed to 1.8 million barrels a day.

Will Murray Goulburn Delist?

Talk persists that Murray Goulburn could try and delist its funding entity, MG Unit Trust as part of a restructuring designed to remove market pressure on the country’s biggest dairy processor as it struggles to emerge from last year’s debacle.

ASX Gives Up 0.7% Over The Week

Australian shares will open lower today, with an eye on a speech later today from Reserve Bank Governor Phil Lowe, as well as the June quarter consumer inflation data on Wednesday.

Commodities Extend Gains

Another reasonable week for key commodities – iron ore finished higher, as did gold and copper (hitting the highest level for more than four months), but oil and wheat again eased.

Diary: Fed Meeting, US Earnings, Local Inflation

It will be another busy week for investors here and offshore with the latest meeting of the US Federal Reserve, the peak week for US second quarter earnings, Australian inflation data for the June quarter and to kick off the week, a major speech later today from Reserve Bank Governor, Phillip Lowe.

OPEC Reconvenes As US Output Pumps

Another big test today for OPEC and Russia’s plan to cap production to drain the global oil glut when parties to the production deal meet in St Petersburg in Russia – a meeting that is widely expected to fail to reach any substantive agreement.

Tech Giants Headline Peak Week For US Earnings

The US earnings reporting season peaks this week with upwards of 200 S&P 500 companies reporting and dominating will be some of the companies underwriting Wall Street’s current strength – Facebook, Alphabet (Google) and Amazon.

Downer ‘Greenmails’ Spotless Shareholders

What’s a little greenmail these days but a flashback to the future of the 1980’s when the idea first came to prominence and became second nature for a host of big names who are now either supporters of Donald Trump, poor, or have had a holiday in Club Fed, or are dead.

Old Problems For New Age Netflix?

Netflix is starting to act like a new age TV network.

Bellamy’s Shares Sour As As Trade Resumes

Shares in dairy company Bellamy’s fell sharply yesterday after being in a trading halt for nearly two weeks.

Ratings Agencies Add Fuel To Bank Rally

Another good day yesterday for the big four banks as investors and analysts realised their gloom and doom has been misplaced.

South32 Misses Production Targets

South 32 disappointed yesterday by missing its full-year production guidance for several commodities after bad weather and poor mining conditions at some operations hit performance.

Sales Slump Sinks Myer, Fletcher CEO Walks