Stan Choe
Updated ,first published
Wall Street remains at record highs after better-than-expected data but Australia’s stock market is expected to bounce back on Monday.
The ASX is set to slide, with futures on Saturday pointing to a loss of 42 points, or 0.5 per cent, at the open. The Australian dollar was trading lower at US72.34¢ at 8.56am AEST.
The bad news continues at CSL which announced on Monday a further $5 billion in write-downs after lowering its revenue outlook for 2026 to $US15.2 billion and net profit (excluding restructuring and impairment charges) to $US3.1 billion.
It pointed to the immunoglobulin inventory crisis in the US and its Albumin business in China as a big part of the recent cutbacks. The stock has already halved since last August.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 rose 0.8 percent to an all-time high on Friday after a report said U.S. employers added 115,000 more jobs than they cut last month, even as the war with Iran raises oil costs and uncertainty for everyone. The Dow Jones gained 12 points, or less than 0.1 percent, and the Nasdaq group gained 1.7 percent for its own record.
While employment declined from March’s level, it was still nearly double what economists had expected. And it helped the S&P 500 close its sixth week of gains, the longest since 2024. The U.S. stock market has been rising since late March, in part on hopes that the war will not mean a worse situation for the global economy and that the Strait of Hormuz will reopen to allow oil tankers from the Persian Gulf to ship again.
It remains to be determined whether those hopes are justified or wishful thinking. US forces attacked and disabled two Iranian oil tankers on Friday after exchanging fire with Iranian forces in the Strait of Hormuz. It is the latest in the fighting and cast doubt on a month-long ceasefire that the US has insisted is still in place.
The price of Brent crude rose 1.2 percent to settle at $US101.29 a barrel following the latest flare-ups. That’s below its high of $US119 during the war, but still more expensive than its level of about $US70 from late February before the fighting began.
One big thing helping to support the US stock market despite the uncertainty of the war is the strong profits that companies have been reporting for the beginning of 2026.
Monster Drink jumped 13.6 percent after the energy drink maker joined the parade of companies topping analysts’ expectations for profit and revenue for the latest quarter. It benefited from strong growth outside the United States, with net sales from there accounting for about 45 percent of its total, the highest percentage ever for the company.
Akamai Technologies jumped even more, 26.6 percent, after its results eclipsed earlier expectations. It announced a $US1.8 billion deal to provide cloud infrastructure services to an unnamed customer over seven years. Cybersecurity and cloud computing companies are benefiting from increased investment in artificial intelligence technology.
Strong demand for AI helped CoreWeave report revenue for the most recent quarter that was more than double what it was a year earlier, but its net loss was worse than analysts had expected. It also issued a range of earnings forecasts for the current quarter that fell in half below analysts’ expectations. Shares of the company, which offers AI computing power to customers on the cloud, fell 11.4 percent.
All told, the S&P 500 rose 61.82 points to 7,398.93. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 12.19 to 49,609.16, and the Nasdaq composite rose 440.88 to 26,247.08.
In stock markets abroad, indexes fell across Europe and Asia. Germany’s DAX lost 1.3 percent, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.9 percent in the two biggest losses.
South Korea’s Kospi was an exception, rising 0.1 percent to another high.
In the bond market, Treasury yields fell and remained low after an earlier report suggested sentiment among US consumers was stuck near the lowest level since 2022. Consumers told a survey from the University of Michigan that they are worried about higher gasoline prices and taxes, although their expectations for inflation in the coming year were slightly reduced.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.36 percent from 4.41 percent late Thursday and from 4.45 percent earlier this week.
Lower yields could lower mortgage rates and other types of credit going to American households and businesses, which could boost the economy. Lower yields also tend to push up the prices of stocks and other types of investments.
The 10-year Treasury yield, though, remains above its pre-war level of 3.97 percent.
AP
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