Australian Stocks: What Happened Today?

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By Ashley Jessen

 

ASX Top Gainers & Losers plus Market Snapshot – 21 February 2014

Global markets continue to teeter on breaking into new all-time highs with the Aussie market unable to break above resistance but coming so very close but it is still very clear that momentum is favouring the bulls.

What are traders talking about today?

•    S&P/ASX200 gained 26.4 points or +0.49% on volume of $4.5 billion, closing at 5438.7.
•    Gold seems to be struggling to break through the $1320-1330 level with the market whipsawing for the last 4 days.
•    Facebook announced it is buying Whatsapp for around $US19 Billion with Whatsapp having around 1.2 billion members.
•    Blackberry shares moved higher on suggestions they could be ripe for a takeover bid.
•    The S&P500 Index in the US is sitting right on a triple top with 1840 proving to be an interesting resistance point. Technical traders will be closely monitoring a breakout or a retracement from these lofty levels.
•    Brent Crude oil had a minor pull back overnight as the $111 per barrel level was too big a hurdle to overcome.
•    Regis Resources suffered some flooding recently in 2 of their mines and after several days of trading halt, came back on with a notice to the market of the larger than expected setback, driving the shares down over 16% on the day.

Economic news

•    Bad economic data in the US seemed to be shrugged off as all economist’s pointed to the bad weather impacting recent data.
•    US Consumer Price Index (CPI) data came in as expected at 0.1%.
•    The Philly Fed manufacturing index had a dramatic fall to -6.3 in February from January’s read of 9.4.
•    European manufacturing data not as great with France missing by quite a large gap with Germany’s PMI reads coming in lower than expectations too.
•    Manufacturing data in the US came in at a 4 year high.
•    Existing home sales in the US is expected to be released later on Friday night/ Saturday morning depending on your time zone.

Australian sector watch

Looking over the charts

•    Despite momentum clearly pointing to a strong potential breakout, the S&P/ASX200 has been unable to break through and close above magical previous high at the 5455-5460 level.
•    Today was an inside day, which is normally neutral to bearish and perhaps traders are somewhat cautious leading in to the weekend.
•    Another factor to consider is several of the large blue chip ASX stocks are going ex-div on Monday including Telstra (TLS:ASX), Woodside Petroleum (WPL:ASX), Suncorp (SUN:ASX) and Wesfarmers (WES:ASX).
•    Trading in the US will be monitored very closely by the technical traders with the S&P500 sitting on a triple top and ready to potentially break through to new highs.

ASX top 200 stock analysis

7% of stocks are showing oversold levels, 55% are showing overbought levels and 70% of stocks are currently above their long term moving average as of close of trading today. View the image below to better understand overbought and oversold levels.

S&P/ASX 200 Gainers and Losers

Top 5 gainers:
•    BRG    BREVILLE GROUP +8.11%
•    MFG    MAGELLAN FINANCIAL GROUP +5.20%
•    QAN    QANTAS AIRWAYS +5.04%
•    MML    MEDUSA MINING +4.90%
•    PNA    PANAUST +4.22%

Top 5 Losers:

•    RRL    REGIS RESOURCES -17.15%
•    STO    SANTOS -4.77%
•    ORA    ORORA -4.03%
•    BEN    BENDIGO AND ADELAIDE BANK -$0.450    -3.83%
•    CWN    CROWN RESORTS -3.19%

 

Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Content included in this article is not by association the view of FNArena (see our disclaimer).