Next Week At A Glance

This story features BEACH ENERGY LIMITED, and other companies. For more info SHARE ANALYSIS: BPT

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.

By Greg Peel

Wall Street will enter next week in the knowledge that the all-time high for the broad market S&P 500, set in October 2007, is only 4.7% away. For the thirty-stock Dow average, it's only 2.4% (with a couple of different constituents in the interim).

There's not an awful lot going on in the rest of the world markets at present to spook the situation (I'm thinking Europe here in particular), so Wall Street is well placed to be inwardly focused. The earnings season will roll on and this week has seen a little more disappointment than last week (eg Apple), while there is a raft of important economic data releases over the week, highlighted by the first estimate of December quarter GDP.

We saw the first little taste of profit-taking after this lengthy rally last night, with the psychological 1500 level in the S&P causing the US indices to back off. Up here towards the old peak, the oxygen is thin. There will likely be a lot of work to do to make a final assault. Aside from next week's events in particular, there remains a cliff to overcome in the ascent. It has quite a ceiling.

The US GDP will be released on Wednesday and will coincide with a Fed policy statement. Wall Street will now be looking for any clues of a QE exit strategy down the track. It's also jobs week in the US, just to add to the excitement, with the private sector number and non-farm payrolls due. We'll also see durable goods, pending home sales, house prices, consumer confidence, income and spending and, on Friday, the January manufacturing PMI. This release will coincide with equivalent releases from Australia, China, the eurozone and UK.

It's Australia Day tomorrow, meaning Monday is a national public holiday. This is so significant that New Zealand will also take the day off. Thereafter, Australia will see business confidence, private sector credit and the PMI but the real focus now is at the micro level. It's busy times for local stock analysts as next week the last of the resource sector production reports merge with the first of the six-monthly profit results (either interim or final) to lead us into the mayhem that is the February reporting season. The real avalanche comes in the last two weeks of the month. 

Production reports from Beach ((BPT)), Oil Search ((OSH)), AWE ((AWE)) and Origin ((ORG)) will be among the highlights while ERA ((ERA)) will kick off the reporting season with Westfield Retail Trust ((WRT)) hot on its heels. To add some flavour, both Wesfarmers ((WES)) and Woolworths ((WOW)) will provide quarterly sales numbers while Orica ((ORI)) will hold its AGM.

I'd love to be a two-headed fly on the wall at that one.
 

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