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Large-caps Meridian Energy (down 4 per cent), Evolution Mining (down 3.9 per cent) and GQG Partners (down 3.7 per cent) suffered some of the sharpest losses.
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Fund manager and property developer Mirvac fell 9 per cent after it forecast lower earnings for the 2025 financial year following a 5 per cent dip in its first-half operating profit.
Myer’s share price dropped by more than 8 per cent after the department store flagged a profit drop of nearly 30 per cent for the 2024 financial year. Sales declined 2.9 per cent to $3.3 billion, with management citing a challenging trading environment, store closures, inflation cost pressures and the underperformance of the Sass & Bide, Marcs and David Lawrence brands as reasons.
Toll road operator Transurban shed 1.5 per cent, with some investors cashing in after it said net profit more than quadrupled over the past year thanks to lower construction and finance costs, and flagged it will pay a 65¢ dividend for financial 2025, up 3¢ a share from this year’s payout.
Qantas shed 1.6 per cent after saying it would dock former CEO Alan Joyce $9.3 million from his final pay following a board-commissioned review of the airline’s management.
The lowdown
Moomoo market strategist Jessica Amir said persistent uncertainty about the outlook for the global economy and company profits had pushed markets down.
“We’ve still got a lot of uncertainty in markets,” she said. “They’ve just started to roll off into earnings season now. Any negative result is being penalised and company shares are falling heavily, whereas any company that delivers the goods is rolling up strongly.”
“But if you scratch beneath the surface, you can see some underlying things are still continuing to dominate, such as gold producers continuing to do well,” she said.
“The Middle East tension is creeping up with Iran and Israel, but now we’ve got Ukrainian troops seizing a gas pipeline in the Russian border, and Russia has declared a state of emergency. So that whole thinking around war tensions picking up is really gaining momentum, and so that’s why we’re seeing oil and gas companies doing well today. The gas price has seen its biggest jump in a year.”
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JP Morgan said on Thursday three quarters of the global carry trade have now been wiped out following the steep sell-off after predictions of a Federal Reserve rate cut and the Bank of Japan’s sharp rate hike last week. In carry trades, investors had borrowed in yen at ultra-low cost to invest in higher yielding assets in other currencies.
On Wall Street overnight, the S&P 500 slipped 0.8 per cent after a jump of 1.7 per cent earlier in the session petered out. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 234 points, or 0.6 per cent, while the Nasdaq composite dropped 1 per cent.
Stocks swung lower as Nvidia, one of Wall Street’s most influential companies, went from a morning gain of 4.4 per cent to a loss of 5.1 per cent that made it the index’s heaviest weight. Nvidia and other Big Tech stocks have been struggling the past month on worries their prices shot too high amid Wall Street’s frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology.
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“It ensures he experiences at least a small fraction of the suffering Qantas inflicted upon its workers and customers throughout his tenure. The recognition that the actions of other Qantas executives were so egregious that their bonuses should also be clawed back emphasises that those remaining are not fit to continue,” said Senator Tony Sheldon, a long-time Qantas critic, after the airline docked former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce $9.3 million from his final pay cheque.