Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
A listener production. The Aussie market has found a way to lift just enough to push us into positive territory for the week.
And markets are bracing for a US-Iran deal. Maybe, maybe not.
Good afternoon, I'm Steve Daglian.
I'm Laura Bessarachi.
Chapter 2: What recent trends have impacted the Australian share market?
It's Friday the 22nd of May. Welcome to the ComSec Market Update.
Well, Stevie, it looks like we're currently hovering around our best level of the day, roughly up by 0.4%. So a very small move higher, but still a second straight day of improvements. And it does look like over the course of the week, we've just snuck into positive territory.
We have, and it's been a huge week, hasn't it? Really volatile as far as the daily moves and swings have been concerned. We're up a third of a percent this week.
Chapter 3: How have US-Iran negotiations affected market expectations?
We did fall 1.3% last week, so keep that in mind when looking at today's improvements. But over the week, we had losses of around 1.5% on both Monday and Wednesday, and then we had improvements of more than 1% on Tuesday and Thursday. and then a small lift today, which was just enough to get us there. But the ASX 200 did sink to a seven-week low on Wednesday.
We also have just had the eighth lift for our market in five weeks. So it's not like there's been a huge amount of optimism in market flowing through in recent times.
That's certainly correct. And if you zoom out a little bit further to see how we're doing over the course of the year so far, I know we've had quite a lot of volatility going on in recent months since the conflict began, but over the year so far, down 0.6%. So it could definitely be worse considering the circumstances.
We did have quite a strong start to the year, which has somewhat offset some of the declines that we've seen in recent months.
Yeah. And look, the Middle East conflict aside, there's been a lot of important events, I guess, in markets over the week. We had Nvidia, the world's largest company, out with its profit results yesterday. It's two and a half times the size of the Aussie market, the biggest stock in the United States as well.
A small beat in revenue growth for the past three months, but there wasn't a real, I guess, quite a lukewarm reception to forecast for the next three months because of all the competition around. and also the fact it's up eightfold in three years. We had the bond market throwing out some concerning signals as well globally over the past week.
But what seemed to help our market over the past two sessions was that softer than expected update on jobs growth in Australia, which had the unemployment rate lift to a near five-year high of 4.5%.
Obviously not a good thing, and it is just one month's worth of data, but it seems to have been enough to significantly pare back the market's expectations of another interest rate hike in coming months. So last week, the market thought the next rate hike might come by September. Now the market thinks there's a chance we might get one by December this year.
The other thing markets have been focusing on, of course, is what's going on with the US-Iran conflict. So we did see US markets push higher, not by much overnight. The Dow was up by 0.6%, the S&P 500 edging higher by a fifth of 1%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq up by a tenth of 1%.
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