ASX edges up at open, gold miners lead gains
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More news: Australian shares opened marginally higher as gold miners led early gains. The benchmark ASX 200 index was up 8.9 points, or 0.10%, to 8,594.9 at 10:35am AEDT. Five of the 11 sectoral indices were in positive territory.
Materials (+0.6%) was the top performing sector, with gold miners making up eight of the top 10 performing ASX 200 stocks.
Ramelius Resources (+8.1%) was the top performer after announcing a $250 million share buyback program and lifting its minimum annual dividend to 2 cents per share. Newmont (+4.9%) and Westgold (+4.1%) were the next best performing.
The energy sector (-0.4%) led losses with oil giants Woodside (-0.9%) and Santos (-1.2%) falling.
Fund manager GQG Partners (-5.4%) was the worst performing ASX 200 stock after reporting a 2.4% drop in total net flows in November.
Australian shares to open higher as Wall St steady before Fed rate call
The news: Australian shares are poised to edge higher at the open after US stocks ended little changed overnight, as the Federal Reserve kicked off its two-day policy meeting, which will culminate in the central bank's final interest rate decision of the year on Thursday morning AEDT.
The numbers: Updated at 7:30am AEDT:
- ASX futures: up 20 points, or 0.23%, to 8,610
- Wall Street: Dow Jones down 0.24%, S&P 500 up 0.01% and Nasdaq up 0.17%.
- Europe: CAC 40 down 0.69%, DAX up 0.49% and FTSE 100 down 0.03%
- Spot gold: up 0.49% to USD4,211 per ounce
- Oil prices: Brent down 0.74% to USD62.03/bbl and US WTI down 0.84% to USD58.39/bbl
- AUD: up 0.27% at 66.42 US cents
- Bitcoin: up 2.77% to USD93,151.
The context: Wall Street finished roughly flat as traders braced for the Fed's next rate call, which is widely expected to be a quarter-percentage point rate cut despite inflation running above the central bank's 2% target.
Stocks had initially risen after October job openings data, delayed due the federal government shutdown, showed a better-than-expected increase in available positions.
However, the Dow was dragged lower as shares in JPMorgan Chase tumbled 4.1%. The banking giant said it expects to spend USD105 billion ($158.2 billion) next year, around 9% above consensus estimates.
