It should be a modest start to trading in local stockmarkets today but the factor to look for is the weakness shown by key commodities such as gold, copper, oil, lead and zinc in European and US trading on Friday.
Wall Street finished with some small gains on the day and the week and our market ended tentatively and in definite need of a confidence boosting lead from somewhere.
The US markets and the greenback were strengthened by the February jobs figures which showed the American economy created 97,000 jobs last month as the unemployment rate eased to 4.5 per cent.
The US employment figures did their now familiar trick of easing fears about an economy slowing to a halt instead of dawdling along in third gear, weighed down by the housing slump.
For the week, all three US stock indexes rose, with the Dow up 1.34 per cent, the S&P up 1.13 per cent and the NASDAQ up 0.83 per cent.
That ended two weeks of falls.
The US dollar rose as expectations of a rate cut eased and gold prices in New York tipped lower with the metal losing around $US5.40 an ounce to end at $US650.10 an ounce.
That was after it showed some strength in London trading earlier in the day.
Oil prices fell 2 per cent on Friday on easing supply concerns and crude for April delivery settled at $US60.05 a barrel on Nymex.
Nickel prices remained near record highs, hitting $US 43,000 a tonne on Friday, just $US200 below its all time high reached on Thursday.
The three-month nickel price fell in late trading to $US42,550 a tonne, down $US300 on the day but up more than 3.6 per cent on the week. Tightness in nickel supplies has pushed the cash price of the metal above $US45,000.
Copper prices fell more than 2 per cent to $US6,125 a tonne on the London Metal Exchange but were up more than $US100 on the week and have recovered most of the losses sustained in the past fortnight.
But a jump in supplies in Shanghai on Friday saw the US price lose around 5USc a lb to finish around $US2.78 a lb.
LME lead and zinc also fell on Friday while US grain prices traded in a narrow range after the latest monthly global crop production forecasts by the US Department of Agriculture.
The Department kept its global corn, wheat and soybean production and stockpile forecasts all but steady from the previous month.
