Not the Prince
Trading Day covers the relevant moves in the Asian stock, commodity, debt and currency markets including a review of the top 8 Australian stocks – the top 4 miners and banks, highlighting trading ideas and investment opportunities. Remember to read “Trading Week“, published each Saturday morning, to put these events and ideas in context.
After last night’s slump, the S&P/ASX200 opened in the red, but quickly recovered as markets in Asia – with the SSEC surging back after a holiday – largely ignored the large falls. The local market still finished down 0.3% or 14 points to 4319, still above the 4300 point resistance barrier its been playing with for months.
Other Asian markets were mixed going into the Easter break, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 down 0.5% to 9767 points after the large fall yesterday. The NZX50 was down 0.3% at 3467 points. The SSE Composite returned after a break, and has surged up nearly 1.8% or 40 points to 2302, whilst the Hang Seng was closed today.
The AUD, which slumped last night against the USD had a small rally today, getting back to just on 1.03 buts remains in its downward trend channel.
Gold had a flat Asian session, after a horror night where it lost nearly 3% and is currently at $1624USD an ounce. In AUD terms it was up $4 to $1593 per ounce.
I’m still keeping an eye on the AUD gold price – there could be a long opportunity here brewing even better than following the USD spot price (using the ETF GOLD, which I covered here), but I’m not so sure just yet.
I’ll be doing Trading Week on Saturday morning as usual and will have a better look at the shiny currency – including a look at its price history back in the 1970’s (its great having Bloomberg now I must say…)
The ASX8 – its Easter – I’ll cover these on Saturday as well…
The Futures
The futures are looking flat going into the European session. US and Euro markets are both pointing to flat opens, whilst the local market is up 12 points to 4330 points. The market-moving data to watch tonight is UK and German industrial productions numbers, whilst the Bank of England meets and is likely to hold interest rates near ZIRP at 0.5% After that, its US Jobless claims – expected to be at 360,000: here’s the chart of recent action, which shows a downtrend and the “recovery” in US unemployment (participation – i.e. giving up look for work is really behind these stats, IMO)
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