ASX Set For Soft Open After Wall St Slides On Stimulus Impasse

By Glenn Dyer | More Articles by Glenn Dyer

The ASX is looking at a nasty slide at the opening later this morning after Wall Street saw a last hour slide that took a negative session into deeper losses.

The market closed deeply in the red as investors worried about the lack of any new stimulus package before the November 3 poll and President Donald Trump blasted his virus expert in a pep talk for campaign staffers who are getting glum about the possible outcome of the poll.

In mid-afternoon trade, the Dow Jones was down 0.7%, the S&P 500 was off 0.8% or nearly 57 points and the Nasdaq had shed 0.7% but by the close those falls had more than doubled.

But by the close the Dow was down 410 points, or 1.4%, the S&P 500 index had lost 1.6% at 3,427, while the Nasdaq shed 192 points, or 1.7% to end at 11,479.

For the Dow it was the roughest day’s trading in four weeks.

That marked the fifth straight decline for the technology-laden Nasdaq Composite and came ahead of the release of important quarterly figures from Netflix and Tesla.

The ASX 24 futures market was off 21 points around 5 am and double that just before 7 am.

That was after the ASX200 closed a little unchanged Monday at 6,229.40.

Oil fell despite the OPEC market monitoring committee making noises about examining weak demand and support for the current production cap. The words failed to reassure the market which is drifting while it awaits the results of the US November 3 poll.

In New York, West Texas Intermediate crude for November delivery, the front-month contract, fell 5 cents, or 0.1%, to settle at $US40.83 a barrel.

The November contract expires at the end of today’s (Tuesday’s) session. The most-active December WTI contract lost 6 cents, or nearly 0.2%, to end at $US41.06 a barrel.

In Europe, the global marker crude, December Brent, fell 31 cents, or 0.7%, to $US42.62 a barrel.

On Comex December gold rose $US5.30, or 0.3%, to settle at $US1,911.70 an ounce, but then fell to around $US1,904 an ounce in after-hours trading. That was after gold recorded a 1% fall last week.

Comex Silver for December delivery meanwhile, added 29 cents, or 1.2%, to end at $US24.698 an ounce and remained in the green in after hours trading.

And Comex December copper settled at $US3.086 a pound, up 0.6% after China’s solid third-quarter GDP and production data was released

Finally, the price of 62% Fe iron roe delivered to northern China rose 45 cents to $US119.53 a tonne.

About Glenn Dyer

Glenn Dyer has been a finance journalist and TV producer for more than 40 years. He has worked at Maxwell Newton Publications, Queensland Newspapers, AAP, The Australian Financial Review, The Nine Network and Crikey.

View more articles by Glenn Dyer →