27th October 2022
Closing Bell - Grady Wulff
The local market’s rally extended into Thursday, with the key index closing 0.5% higher in its best session in 6-weeks, boosted by a surge in energy stocks. An array of corporate earnings results were released today including ANZ (ASX:ANZ), which beat expectations but investors sharply sold out amid uncertain outlook for the year ahead and the increase of the bank’s provision for doubtful debts, and Reece which investors piled into after the company released a Q1 trading update outlining sales revenue jumped 28.8% to $2.3 billion boosted by inflation.
Australian Clinical Labs (ASX:ACL) is the latest company to report a cyber-attack that happened back in February, whereby the health records and credit card information of about 223,000 patients and staff in its Medilab Pathology business were stolen and posted on the dark web. Shares in the company plunged more than 5% today. While Weebit Nano (ASX:WBT) surged nearly 30% today after announcing it has successfully completed full technology qualification of its Resistive Random-Access Memory (ReRam Module) manufactured by its R&D partner CEA-Leti, which is a key step that must be completed for every semiconductor product on each new target process.
The winning stocks for today’s session were Ramelius Resources (ASX:RMS) adding 8.4% a day after the gold miner reaffirmed production guidance for FY23, Sandfire Resources (ASX:SFR) lifting 7% and Regis Resources (ASX:RRL) ending the day up 6.85%. On the losing end of the market, Iluka Resources (ASX:ILU) took the biggest hit today, falling 6.31% despite no price sensitive news released by the company today, Core Lithium (ASX:CXO) fell 5.15% today and Pinnacle Investment Management (ASX:PNI) lost 3.35% today.
The most traded stocks by Bell Direct clients today were Lake Resources (ASX:LKE), Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX:CBA) and WA1 Resources (ASX:WA1).
The Australian dollar is trading higher again this afternoon against the green back with 1 Aussie dollar buying 64.82 US cents, 55.90 British Pence, 94.56 Japanese Yen and 1 New Zealand Dollar and 11 Cents.
Following Australia’s inflation rate hitting a 32-year high for the September quarter of 7.3%, investors will be awaiting the release of the RBA’s latest cash rate hike next Tuesday when the central bank next meets.