Share market buoyed by Wall St lead
The Australian sharemarket finished higher on Tuesday, buoyed by a strong result from Wall St on Monday that translated to local gains.
The S&P/ASX 200 index was up 50.7 points, or 0.7 per cent, to 7210.5 points at the closing bell, with nine of the 11 sectors in the green.
Materials and discretionary were the strongest performing sectors, up 1.6 and 1.4 per cent respectively, while technology fell 0.3 per cent.
The All Ordinaries also rose, up 50.5 points or 0.7 per cent, to 7416.4 points.
Mixed miner Mineral Resources and lithium miner Sayona Mining were among the strongest performers, up 8 per cent and 26.4 per cent respectively.
Mineral Resources announced a 40 per cent jump in revenue to $4.8bn in its latest full year report.
Fintech and BNPL stocks also performed strongly.
Zip Co stock price jumped by 4.6 per cent, following the announcement of record transaction volumes and revenue for the year ending in June.
EML Payments and Tyro Payments both soared with gains of 31.5 per cent and 14.7 per cent, respectively. The surge in the embattled payments company EML’s share price comes despite recording a $285m loss.
Star Entertainment was up 2.1 per cent, however the casino operator reported a full-year loss of $2.4bn and booked a $2bn impairment in the combined value of its Sydney, Gold Coast, and Brisbane casinos.
Cement and concrete group Adbri fell 14.6 per cent despite recording a 3 per cent lift in net profit to $49.7m over the six months to June 30.
Gemma Dale, director of SMSG and investor behaviour at Nabtrade, said Tuesday’s results showed a “fair amount of optimism”, given traders expected markets could have performed worse.
“It felt like a day of getting bad news out there and everyone’s a little bit relieved. There was a fair amount of optimism that things were not worse,” Ms Dale said.
“It could have been worse. We seem to be okay. That seems to be the prevailing theme.”
The stronger performance from Zip, EML and Tryo suggested that consumers were weathering increased cost-of-living as data showed shoppers hadn’t fallen into arrears.
“What made the market happy was … that that little bit of comfort, that repayments are being made, that we‘re not going to see consumers using buy now pay later and then totally failing to make the repayments,” Ms Dale said.
Later on Tuesday evening, incoming Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock was to deliver a speech entitled ‘Climate change and central banks’.
With the ASX reporting season drawing to a close, traders will be closely monitoring results for Bank of Queensland, which will give further details on consumer spending and mortgage repayments.
Retailer Harvey Norman and commercial real estate company Cromwell Property are also set to report later this week.
