Australian Shares

By Chris Becker  Insert fear/panic quote here.

Another day of stupidity on local stocks, with the ASX200 selling off because ScoMo had some choice words for the unwashed hoarders, while other stock markets lifted across the region.

Shares in Australia-listed real estate investment trusts fell sharply yesterday amid growing concern about the impact of the coronavirus on their operations.

The Australian dollar is still trading below 60 cents: Bonds are bid after the opening yield spike: XJO is off a breezy 4%: As Big Iron sells: Big Oil has been annihilated: Big Gold is hanging in.

Everywhere the call goes out.

By Chris Becker  It’s all about the stimulus with stock markets lifting overnight in the wake of combined fiscal packages from various governments to offset the economic cost of the coronavirus impact.

Another volatile day on Asian stock markets, this time to the upside for most outside China, as a modicum of stability returns to risk markets following the epic falls on Wall Street overnight.

As we know, Australia’s consumption growth was already in the gutter in the December quarter, with household final consumption spending growing at its lowest rate since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC): Blind Freddy can see that the January bush fires alongside the coronavirus will smash consumption over subsequent quarters.

By Chris Becker  Panic and fear are ruling markets, with stock markets likely to see restrictions in trading soon if this epic volatility continues.

In 2014, the Coalition spearheaded by Mathias Cormann opened a loophole in FOFA legislation that allowed listed investment vehicles called LICs and LITs to exclusively pay financial advisor commissions.

Here we go again.

Via Goldman: The coronavirus has created unprecedented financial and societal disruption.

By Chris Becker  Friday night saw volatility violently veer the other way with big surges on stocks and selloffs in safe havens like gold, Treasuries and Yen. Oh and Bitcoin which crashed down to $4000 before rebounding 50% (not a typo) to almost $6000!

Via Nomura: The plunge in US equities yesterday (12 March) pushed weekly returns down to 7.7 standard deviations below the norm. In statistical science, the odds of a greater-than seven-sigma event of this kind are astronomical to the point of being comical (about one such event every 160 billion years).

It’s still ugly out there with Asian equities falling sharply but not as fast as Wall Street overnight, but all stock indices are now in bear market territory for the year.

From the excellent Jonthon Mott at UBS: A week is a long time… Now incorporating an Australian recession and QE Given the rapidly deteriorating environment, UBS has further reduced our economic outlook.

It is getting pretty damn impressive now.

By Chris Becker  Panic has set in on risk markets around the world with shares suffering their worst one day loss since 1987 as Wall Street plummets 10% in a single session.

This is not advice, it is commentary.

It’s getting ugly out there with the ASX200 having its worst day since 2008, falling nearly 8%, while other Asian equities are off by about half that as Trump enacts a European travel ban.