Kathmandu and Rip Curl owner KMD Brands climbed 6.8 per cent after saying it managed to slow sales declines at its brands over the March and June quarters. It flagged underlying earnings of $49 million to $51 million for the year ended July 31, with its final results scheduled for late September.

Baby Bunting jumped 8.9 per cent after the infant goods retailer said its sales turned around in the first seven weeks of its financial year. It flagged a profit of $9.5 million to $12.5 million for the current year after earnings had slumped 75 per cent to $3.7 million last year.

The laggards

On the flipside, coal miner Yancoal plunged 14.5 per cent after the company withheld dividends for the June half, saying it would hold on to its $429 million half-yearly profit to bolster its war chest for potential mine acquisitions.

Office property fund Dexus shed 8.9 per cent after reporting a $1.58 billion statutory net loss, more than twice as big as a year ago, following $1.9 billion in losses in the valuation of investment property.

The lowdown

The Australian sharemarket ran up as high as 8025.20 in early trading, getting above 8000 points for the first time since its two-day sell-off earlier this month, but fell below that mark again after the Reserve Bank published minutes of its meeting earlier this month, which showed its board discussed further rate hikes before settling on keeping interest rates on hold at their current 12-year high.

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The central bank expects it will have to keep rates elevated for an “extended period” to ensure that inflation returns to its target band next year, suggesting relief for Australian borrowers remains some way off.

Still, this wasn’t enough to dampen positive sentiment overall, which according to Moomoo strategist Jessica Amir has been improving ahead of this week’s Jackson Hole symposium in the US, where global markets will be closely watching remarks of Fed chair Jerome Powell.

Investors have already fully priced in four rate cuts in the world’s largest economy by March next year, which could set the scene for other central banks around the world.

“Markets are pretty bullish and they are optimistic,” Amir said. “They know that rate cuts are probably coming.”

Amir said this prospect of interest rate cuts was supporting risk assets such as equities, while a rise in commodity prices was also good news for the Australian market.

The local gains came after Wall Street rallied on Monday. The S&P 500 climbed 1 per cent for its eighth straight gain, clinching its longest winning streak since November. The index is back to within 1 per cent of its all-time high after falling close to 10 per cent below the mark earlier this month.

The Dow Jones gained 236 points, or 0.6 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite jumped 1.4 per cent.

Tweet of the day

Quote of the day

“‘Competition’ between them resembles a cosy pillow fight, with profit margins coming first and everyday Kiwis coming second,” said New Zealand’s Finance Minister Nicola Willis as she slammed the big four Australian banks that dominate her country’s banking sector for behaving in an uncompetitive manner.

New Zealand’s government has now pledged to disrupt the Big Four’s “oligopoly” by injecting capital into state-owned Kiwibank.

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The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has made headway in its efforts to stem the seemingly never-ending tide of scammers, taking down more than 7300 phishing and investment scam websites in the past year. The amount of money lost to scams is also falling. It was at $2.74 billion in 2023, down from $3.1 billion in 2022. The regulator attributes this, in part, to its taking down of dodgy websites since last year.

with AP

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