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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
A listener production.
Aussie stocks slip for a second day as our two largest sectors fall heavily. And what are some of the key events investors should be watching in the holiday shortened week ahead? Good afternoon. I'm Steve Daglian.
Chapter 2: Why did the ASX experience a second consecutive day of losses?
It's Friday, the 5th of June. Welcome to the ComSec Market Update. Well, hello, everyone. Happy Friday. It was not a great way to end the week, though it must be said the ASX 200 at the moment is down by about 0.7%.
Chapter 3: What key events should investors watch for in the upcoming week?
And this means that over the past two days, the market has shed close to 2% of its value. Now, it was a pretty mixed bag in the US last night. We had the Dow finishing at a record high, but on the flip side, we had the tech-heavy Nasdaq actually falling. And adding to this, at the moment, futures are pointing to a sluggish start for US markets tonight when they reopen.
So just a reminder again that our market will be closed on Monday for a public holiday. So we'll basically probably be doing a bit of catch-up by the time that the ASX reopens on Tuesday. It has been Quite a week for the Australian share market. We've had good and bad news over the past five days. Today marks the fourth decline in five days. We've fallen about 1.2% this week as well.
But on Wednesday, our share market actually hit a near four-week high. We cracked 8,800 points for the ASX 200 for the first time in quite some time since the 8th of May. And what the catalyst was there was a softer reading on economic growth for the March quarter in Australia. which added to expectations that the Reserve Bank might just keep rates on hold for the rest of the year.
On the flip side, though, there's been quite a bit of caution as well relating to a lack of progress on a US-Iran peace deal with tempers flaring with both nations carrying out fresh airstrikes just yesterday. And also at the tail end of the week, we've had some of our major mining stocks, the likes of BHP and Rio, falling away from the record highs they hit on Wednesday.
And one of the reasons seems to be reports of surging iron ore supplies heading to China. And this is from West Africa. So quite a bit to look at over the course of the week. But if we turn our attention to the different sectors locally today, really it's the mining sector, which is worse. It's down by 2.3%. We've got energy stocks down about 1.1% and the financials are falling by around 0.9%.
Outside of those three, we've got the rest of the market actually lifting. So it's a pretty even split between winners and losers today.
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Chapter 4: How did US market performance influence the ASX today?
But the fact that we've got our two largest sectors, financials and materials, which make up more than half of the entire market in the red, that certainly has been a pretty significant weight on our market. And also healthcare stocks, they're the big winners today. They're up about 3.5%, but a bit more on those in a moment.
Now, if we look at a few of the big winners of the day, individual names, we've got Megaport, easily the best performer. It's a tech company. It's up 12.5%. It has been in a trading halt for most of the week, and it's just raised around $518 million from larger institutional investors. Now, a couple of days ago, it secured four new AI infrastructure contracts worth around $450 million.
Part of its plan is to essentially just build out a GPU pool. GPUs, of course, are graphics processors often used by tech and AI models and tech giants as well. So Megaport is looking at snapping up NVIDIA chips and then renting them out to customers for AI purposes. Remember as well that Megaport was the strongest improver on the ASX in May as well. It was up 69%.
Another winner today, the second best is Tuas, which is up around 8.1%. So it's had a pretty solid week, but I think context is important for Tuas because it's a telco, does a lot of work in Singapore. It was last month's worst performer. It fell by 65% in May. And it was basically on the verge of becoming Singapore's third largest telco.
A merger would have essentially got it there, but that fell through a couple of weeks ago because of some pushback from a Singapore-based regulator. So it was certainly one of the worst. Now, I talked about healthcare standing out today, and one of the big winners is CSL. It's the largest stock in the healthcare sector.
at one point was the largest stock on our share market briefly, but has not done well on the market for quite some time now. So it's up 5%. Many other stocks in the healthcare sector are surging today as well. Cochlear, the hearing implant maker, ResMed, which sells sleep apnea marks, Tilex Pharmaceuticals, they're all up.
But I think what's important when you look at healthcare is that it is easily the worst performer on our market since the start of this calendar year. It's basically shed around a third of its value since the 1st of January. Now, to put that into perspective, the second worst performer is actually tech, and it's only down by around 11%. Also, Deep Yellow is lifting today by around 3%.
This is a uranium miner, received a broker upgrade, Now, it has close to halved on the ASX from its January high after a few solid years on the ASX. And we've got to remember as well that this has been a pretty big week for some uranium miners. And one piece of big news globally was the fact that the US announced a significant ramp-up
in the only US facility currently enriching commercial levels of uranium for nuclear power plants. So that saw stocks like Paladin doing well, at least for a day or two earlier in the week. And private health insurer NIB is also up around 2.5% today. It's selling what's left.
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