Next Week At A Glance

This story features ANZ GROUP HOLDINGS LIMITED. For more info SHARE ANALYSIS: ANZ

By Rudi Filapek-Vandyck

Seems like investors in the Australian share market have once again learned the valuable lesson that drawing direction from the Dow Industrials on Wall Street is a flawed strategy. For starters, the S&P500 is a much better indicator for what is going on on Wall Street. Secondly, it pays to pay attention to the trend on the day and overnight that trend was down from earlier gains.

Those who follow me on Twitter would have picked up that I tweeted about how the resources-heavy Canadian bourse closed their overnight session with losses, in particular the materials stocks and it appears that was the correct guidance to take for the local session on Friday. Of course, looking forward to a long weekend and a Chinese data dump that is (market fears) likely to surprise to the downside helps explaining today's share market losses as well.

(To those who only read my Overnight Report: apologies for the omission. It only occurred to me after I posted the story on the website).

Note that analysts at ANZ Bank published their impressions from a recent trip to China yesterday and amongst conclusions drawn was that the situation on the ground was actually worse than what they expected. Conclusion: prepare for further deterioration in the short term, but more support and stimulus should bring improvement on a medium term horizon. Yesterday's interest rate cut is yet another step in that process.

Stop the Press: ANZ Bank ((ANZ)) just announced the bank will pass on the full RBA rate cut -all 25 basis points- to its mortgage clients. A positive for the Oz economy, but a slight negative for ANZ shareholders?

Australian investors will have plenty of time to assess further developments over the weekend as this time it's Australians' time to enjoy a long weekend. This means FNArena will publish the weekly Monday Report on Tuesday with updates on two Wall Street sessions and the China data dump from the weekend.

I hope you will all enjoy the extra me-time.

As far as the economic calendar goes, next week looks rather dull with little excitement scheduled in advance. Of course, the Greek elections are creeping closer and it is well possible that Europe comes out with an announcement from left field to save Spain and its troubled banks.

As far as scheduled events are concerned, we might as well fast-foward to next Friday when the Bank of Japan convenes and the US reports on industrial production, consumer confidence and the Empire State manufacturing index for June. Prior to that we have a central bank meeting in NZ (no disrespect but: C'mon…), industrial production in Japan (anyone still interested?) and, on Wednesday, business invenstories, PPI and retail sales in the US. So Wednesday might move equities on Wall Street around a little as well.

On the local front, we have the obligatory minutes to the recent RBA meeting on Tuesday and the latest NAB business confidence survey and the Westpac consumer confidence survey on Wednesday.

Enjoy the long weekend.

For a more comprehensive preview of next week's events, please refer to "The Monday Report", published each Monday morning. For all economic data release dates, ex-div dates and times and other relevant information, please refer to the FNArena Calendar.

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