Our market is struggling today – down 85 or 1.7% - after heavy falls on Wall Street. Property doing most of the damage, down 4.8%, Financials down 2.8% and resources struggling falling 1.5% today after a big day of gains yesterday. The main consensus is that although the US government's package will help, we are still far from being out-of-the-woods. The Dow Futures are suggesting an 11 point rise on Wall Street tonight.
The US dollar turned and commodities rebounded strongly as markets took fright at the ramifications of not only the $US700 billion bail out plan, but its transformation into a garbage bin for all sorts of failed financial assets, even shares.
Sigma Pharmaceuticals is Australia's biggest contract maker of drugs and in the past year or so it has been an indifferent performer as costs got out of control, sales growth slowed and competition intensified.
Tough times for the Seven Network: its lead in TV ratings is no longer translating to higher ad revenues and earnings, and a mis-timed play in the stockmarket could cost it more than $200 million in losses.
The slowdown underway in the resources boom is illustrated from the latest commodity forecasts from ABARE, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
Share markets around the world rebounded strongly on Friday as regulators took steps to shore up the financial system. The Australia sharemarket regained much of its losses last Friday, closing 4.3% higher, but still down 2% for the week.
Our market is up a massive 190 or 3.8%. It was an unusual start to the day with the market opening 10:40am after ASIC banned short selling for 30 days effective this morning. They will review the practice once the 30 days are up. ASIC originality announced on Friday that all "naked" short selling (investors selling shares they don't actually have) would be banned but upgraded the restrictions to all stocks (not just financials like in the US, Canada and Britain) because of the risk of hedge funds going go to town on our relatively small market. Babcock & Brown was up 110% in early trading.
