The ASX will start with a small gain this morning after Wall Street faded to a close on Friday.
The ASX 200 closing Friday’s session down 0.1% to 6,167 that left the market down 0.2% for the week.
Some corporate news this week – Bloomberg says Coca Cola Amatil is tipped to receive a $10 billion takeover offer today from Coca Cola’s European bottling associate.
Fortescue and Newcrest produce quarterly production reports and ANZ Bank reveals its 2019-20 full-year profits on Thursday.
That small rise for the ASX today comes after a solid 0.8% gain for eurozone shares on Friday followed by a more tentative 0.3% rise for the US S&P 500.
The gains came despite record and near recorded rises in COVID-19 cases across Europe and the US (more than 85,000 in the latter on Friday alone).
It’s a week to go for the November 3 elections in the US so markets there will go into a holding pattern until the result becomes clear – possibly towards the end of next week (unless it is a landslide on Tuesday).
That is now the biggest influence on markets, along with the escalating COVID-19 cases with hopes of a firm deal on new economic stimulus in the US gone.
These issues saw global share markets mostly lower over last week.
US shares fell 0.5%, Eurozone shares lost 1.3% and Chinese shares fell 1.5% but Japanese shares managed a 0.5% gain.
While the oil price fell, gold, metals and iron ore prices rose helped by a falling US dollar. This also saw the $A rise, up half a cent to 71.39 US cents by Saturday morning.
The Dow closed 28.09 points lower, or 0.1%, to 28,335.57, the S&P 500 added 11.9 points, or 0.34%, to 3,465.39 and the Nasdaq Composite was up 42.28 points, or 0.37%, to 11,548.28.
For the week, the Dow ended down 0.9%, the S&P 500 fell 0.5% and Nasdaq declined 1.1%.
The third-quarter earnings season, meanwhile, chugged along, with about 84% of the 135 S&P 500 companies that have reported so far topping quarterly profit estimates, according to Refinitiv data.
