ASX to fall amid AI jitters, oil steadies
Andre Janse van Vuuren and Stan Choe
Australian shares are expected to fall slightly after rallying last week following strong gains by gold miners. Futures on Monday are pointing to a slide of 0.4 per cent at the opening bell and the Australian dollar is trading higher around 69.38 US cents at 6am AEDT.
On global markets, the latest round of jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade subsided, with Europe’s benchmark rising to an all-time high last week. Europe’s utility and technology sectors outperformed to send the Stoxx 600 to a fourth week of gains.
Most US stocks rose on Thursday – the last trading in the US in a holiday-shortened week – as the Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied to another record, but more drops for computer chip companies and other winners of the artificial-intelligence boom kept indexes mixed.
The S&P 500 finished the week virtually unchanged and edged up by less than 0.1 per cent, even though seven out of every 10 stocks within the index rose. The Dow jumped 594 points, or 1.1 per cent, while the Nasdaq composite dropped 0.8 per cent after erasing an early gain.
The US dollar touched a two-week low while gold extended gains.
The gains mark latest turn in a stretch of choppy trading as markets grapple with whether the second quarter’s AI-driven rally has gone too far. With stocks recovering after a two-day rout in chipmakers, investors are waiting for the upcoming earnings season as the next signal of whether massive spending on AI infrastructure can translate into profits.
“The fundamentals are still very, very strong and the market is still underpricing them,” Tim Moe, equity strategist at Goldman Sachs said. “There still is a lot longer to go in the overall positive profit environment for memory stocks and the AI hardware supply chain space overall.”
Worries that persistent inflation pressures would leave the Fed little choice but to tighten policy have subsided in recent days, with oil prices easing and an unexpectedly sharp slowdown in US labor market growth.
“Unless and until we see clearer signs that the energy spike has filtered its way through to underlying inflation, we think that the Fed will opt for a cautious approach to policy tightening,” noted Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at Ebury.
Brent steadied below $US72 a barrel as traders weighed the outlook for increased supply through the Strait of Hormuz and continuing talks between the US and Iran.
Meanwhile, nervousness about AI valuations has seen investors turning away from US stocks at the fastest pace since March, according to Bank of America strategists.
The country’s stock funds had $US17.2 billion in outflows in the week through July 1, the team led by Michael Hartnett wrote in a note, citing EPFR Global Data. Investors turned to some international stocks instead, with Japanese equities seeing their biggest inflows in seven weeks at $US1.9 billion.
Traders now see an 82 per cent chance that the Fed and its new chairman, Kevin Warsh, will not raise the federal funds rate at its next meeting later this month. That’s up from the 71 per cent chance seen a day earlier, according to data from CME Group.
“The labor market isn’t overheating,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economic strategist at Annex Wealth Management. He said the data could allow the Fed to wait through the summer to get more clues about how inflation is behaving before having to decide on hiking rates.
Bloomberg, AP
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