PM 22 Sep 26: Lithium surge steals market spotlight
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Why did the Australian market edge higher despite a cautious tone?
a listener production. The Aussie market edges higher in another somewhat cautious session. Why have oil prices fallen heavily in overnight trade and which lithium miner just surged by about 50%? Good afternoon, I'm Steve Daglian. It's Tuesday, the 22nd of September. Welcome to the CommSec Market Update. Well, good afternoon, everyone. The Aussie market has done reasonably well on Tuesday. This is after a completely flat finish on Monday. We've got the AS6200 as we approach the close, lifting by around a third of a percent. The best levels of the day were up about twice as much, but... at the worst levels, we're only up by less than a tenth of a percent. So it looks like we're going to finish somewhere in between the day's range.
Now, the US market did push a little higher overnight, led in particular by the tech-heavy NASDAQ, which surged by more than 2.2%. And it actually finished at a closing record high for the first time in about three months. Now, there are a couple of things working in the market's favor at the moment. In part, four-day decline in oil prices, which have actually fallen by 8% over that run, but also hopes of US-Iran diplomacy at a UN summit this week. Now, President Trump saying that he may meet with the Iranian president on the sidelines of the gathering. Now, perhaps we can take that with a grain of salt, but there are incentives for a deal to be reached sooner rather than later at the moment, especially with some inventory issues as far as declining inventories of oil.
In addition to this, there are falling approval ratings ahead of the US midterm elections in November. Fuel prices over in the United States remain elevated. They're about 20% to 30% dearer now than they were seven months ago before the conflict started. But also the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, raised interest rates for the first time in more than three years just last week. And the markets are currently still pricing in an additional two rate hikes in America and the United States by February next year. Adding to this, there are constraints on military resources and missile stockpiles as well. So these are some of the drivers at the moment in markets. And bond yields have also eased a touch over in the US from last week's 20-year highs for the US 10 years.
Now, they're still very elevated and not too far from those levels, but they've at least declined a little from those heights. Now, locally today, we are seeing a mixed bag across the different sectors, but overall, it seems to have been a bit of a risk on sort of mood and attitude by markets. We've got tech stocks lifting around 2.7% following the US technology giants higher. We've also got retailers in that consumer discretionary space standing out. They're up about 1.3%. Property trusts and other interest rate sensitive area up around 0.8%. and we've got the materials lifting around 0.6% along with the industrials and healthcare stocks as well. There are some losers. Really unsurprisingly, it's the energy sector that is down quite heavily by around 1.2%, and that's because of a 4.3% tumble in oil prices overnight.
So considering they have fallen for four days and they're near the worst levels in a couple of weeks, that's been one of the reasons why stocks like Woodside and Santos have been heading backwards at the moment. Now, if we look at a specific winners today, um, we've got Tealix Pharmaceuticals doing reasonably well. Now it did actually fall yesterday, but it's managed to rebound and is currently the third best performer on the market with a gain of around six and a half percent actually. So it's doing okay. Um, Now, yesterday it fell because of a deal to pay 1.65 billion US dollars, an initial payment, to acquire a privately owned German radio pharmaceutical company that develops cancer diagnostics.
Now, today's lift also coincides with a broker upgrade that it received today, labelling the acquisition as strategic. We've also got a data centre operator, NextDC, lifting 5%. WiseTech in the tech space lifting around 4.5%.
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