Next Week At A Glance – 17-21 Jan 2022

This story features BHP GROUP LIMITED, and other companies. For more info SHARE ANALYSIS: BHP

By Rudi Filapek-Vandyck, Editor

The share market is a restless teenager who can only focus on one item and on one item only at any given time. January 2022 happens to be one of those times when investors are being reminded of this old truism.

It may not necessarily catch anyone's attention during the great and the good times, but when sentiment shifts, and portfolios need re-calibrating, daily market moves can be extremely frustrating, and painful, when on "the other side" of market momentum.

Every day now, the local market sees less than half of listed stocks end on a positive note, leaving plenty of portfolios in the cold with hardly anything to cheer about. At least not in the short term.

This too shall pass eventually, of course. Though it's anyone's guess when and how exactly.

Up until today, Friday the 14th, the economic and corporate calendar has been rather empty thus far in January. Later today we'll see a number of economic releases overseas with industrial production and retail sales in the US likely to grab some headlines during tonight's session.

The calendar gets somewhat busier next week, with China scheduled to dump timely data releases on Monday, but also with resources companies locally starting to release their production numbers for the December quarter. Next week also includes the BHP ((BHP)) AGM which will be interesting on multiple levels.

The Big Australian will soon retreat from the London Stock Exchange and pretty much double its weight in Australian indices. Yes, such a large weighting is certainly not unprecedented in Australia; think the 1980s. An interesting titbit: during the dot com period News Corp's ((NWS)) two classes of shares represented no less than 13% of the ASX200.

Think about that for a few minutes.

CommBank ((CBA)) and CSL ((CSL)) will have to suck it up. It's going to take a long while before anyone can challenge BHP's number one position on the ASX now.

But with Afterpay ((APT)) disappearing and Block listing locally, while Macquarie Group ((MQG)) has now overtaken ANZ Bank ((ANZ)) in market capitalisation, ready to challenge Westpac ((WBC)) and National Australia Bank ((NAB)) next, there will be a lot more reasons for institutional investors to make ongoing adjustments to allocations.

The calendar is only getting busier from here onwards, and next week is but a minor step up ahead of what will be a very interesting February reporting season in Australia. Omicron, supply chains, input inflation, and labour challenges are only some of the items that will feature prominently.

For those investors who'd enjoy a sneak peak into the week(s) ahead, FNArena offers a four-week forward looking calendar, which is updated on ongoing basis:

https://www.fnarena.com/index.php/financial-news/calendar/

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