Shares in Endeavour Group jumped 1.7 per cent after it announced it had snagged Supercheap Auto’s boss to head up Dan Murphy’s as managing director.
Consumer sentiment surged to its highest level since before the 2022 election, with the closely watched Westpac-Melbourne Institute measure of consumer sentiment jumping 12.8 per cent this month. Optimists outnumber pessimists for the first time since February 2022 and, excluding the wild swings in consumer sentiment during the COVID pandemic, it is the highest rating in seven years.
The Australian dollar was trading at US65.20¢ at 5.05pm AEDT.
Overnight, big tech and other superstars of the US sharemarket got back to rallying on Monday, as Wall Street recovered most of its loss from last week.
The S&P 500 climbed 1.5 per cent and clawed back nearly all its drop from last week, which was its first weekly loss in four. The Dow Jones rose 381 points, or 0.8 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite jumped 2.3 per cent for its best day since May.
Nvidia was by far the strongest force lifting the market, leaping 5.8 per cent. It was a powerful rebound after Nvidia and other winners of the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology led last week’s drop. Critics say their stock prices shot too high and too fast in the AI mania, drawing comparisons to the 2000 dot-com bubble that ultimately burst.
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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes chips for Nvidia and other companies, saw its stock that trades in the United States rise 3.1 per cent after reporting that its revenue climbed nearly 17 per cent in October from a year earlier. While such growth is strong compared with other companies, it’s a slowdown from TSMC’s earlier performance.
Another AI darling, Palantir Technologies, jumped 8.8 per cent for the biggest gain in the S&P 500. That helped it recover some of its loss since it delivered a profit report last week that topped analysts’ expectations.
Drops for several health insurers helped keep the market’s gains in check. They fell as uncertainty remains about whether Washington will extend expiring healthcare tax credits, a sticking point on Capitol Hill that’s created the longest-ever shutdown for the US government.
That’s even though the Senate took the first steps on Sunday to end the shutdown.
US President Donald Trump suggested in a social media post over the weekend that cash being sent to “money sucking” insurance companies should instead go directly to people so they can buy their own health insurance.
Humana fell 5.4 per cent, Elevance Health sank 4.4 per cent and Centene dropped 8.8 per cent.
Elsewhere on Wall Street, Berkshire Hathaway slipped 0.4 per cent as its chief executive, famed investor Warren Buffett, warned shareholders that many other companies will fare better in the decades ahead because of Berkshire Hathaway’s massive size. Buffett, 95, is set to step down in January.
In sharemarkets abroad, indexes rallied across much of Europe and Asia.
