Good morning, and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog — and the new financial year!
I’ll be guiding you through the latest market action for the next few hours.
And it looks like the local share market will have another quiet start to its day.
ASX futures, which are a rough indicator of how the market may open, have risen by just 0.1%. So it suggests the market will open either flat, or slightly higher.
The Australian dollar has recovered slightly to 69.2 US cents, but is still down 3.4% over the past month.
AI frenzy drives Wall Street higher
The ‘AI trade‘, meanwhile, continued to push Wall Street‘s industrial stock index to new record highs.
Once again, it seems technology stocks with any kind of connection to artificial intelligence rallied overnight, including Nvidia (2.6%), Apple (+2.7%), SpaceX (+4.1%), AMD (+7.7%), Sandisk (+10.9%) and Intel (+6%).
So today investors were feeling incredibly bullish, and not at all bothered by concerns that many of these companies might be overspending on AI investments — which may take many years before there’s a return on investment (if it even happens at all).
Nevertheless, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.3% to 53,219 points, its highest-ever closing figure.
The benchmark S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite indexes gained 0.8% and 1.5% respectively.
Anyway, please grab a coffee, tea or whatever you normally have in the morning, and I’ll have more updates for you shortly!
