ASX set to advance, Wall Street steady; Solly Lew joins Myer board

Wall Street held near its record high in a relatively quiet day for markets worldwide.

The S&P 500 closed flat and is sitting 0.4 per cent below its all-time high set last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 185 points, or 0.4 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite advanced 0.5 per cent.

The Australian sharemarket is set to rise, with futures at 5.58am AEST pointing to a rise of 27 points, or 0.3 per cent, at the open. The ASX added 0.3 per cent on Tuesday. The Australian dollar was trading at US71.12¢.

Retailer Myer announced it has appointed its biggest shareholder, billionaire ragtrader Solomon Lew, to its board of directors.

The department store purchased clothing chains Just Jeans, Jay Jays, Portmans, Dotti and Jacqui E from Lew in a $950 million deal in late October 2024, and at that time had invited Lew to the board. Lew, who owns Peter Alexander and Smiggle, holds a 30 per cent stake in Myer and has a net worth of $3.8 billion, according to the AFR’s Rich List.

This is a victory lap of sorts for Lew, who served on the board of what was then Coles Myer for 17 years from 1985, including a stint as chairman. He was ultimately kicked off the board in 2002 following a very public boardroom spat over conflicts of interest as his private businesses were key suppliers to Coles Myer.

Overnight, US stocks had been higher earlier in the session, when the price for a barrel of Brent crude briefly fell below $US98. But oil prices later trimmed their losses, and Brent was most recently at $US99.66 per barrel.

That’s down from the nearly $US110 that it touched last week, but it’s still much more expensive than the $US72 it was fetching before the war with Iran began. It’s been swinging with uncertainty about when the war will allow crude to freely flow again from the Middle East to customers worldwide.

On Wall Street, AutoZone rose 3.2 per cent after the retailer reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, though its revenue fell short. CEO Phil Daniele said the auto parts seller faced “a difficult selling environment” in the first two months of the quarter, but it improved afterward and “we feel we are well positioned for sales growth” in its upcoming fiscal year.

At Thor Industries, which sells recreational vehicles, the mood was more muted. CEO Bob Martin said expensive fuel, high interest rates and still-high inflation are stretching its customers’ budgets, and business “never reached the inflection point many in the industry expected” in its latest fiscal year.

Its stock rose 5.5 per cent, though, after it delivered a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

Such strong profit reports are one of the main reasons the US stock market has reached the brink of its all-time high despite high oil prices and jitters about whether stocks in the artificial-intelligence industry shot too high.

Many companies are close to closing the books on their third quarter of the year, which ends with September. And analysts are forecasting companies in the S&P 500 will report overall growth of nearly 29 per cent for the quarter from a year earlier, according to FactSet.

If they’re right, it would be the third straight quarter of growth better than 25 per cent for the index. And stock prices tend to follow the track of corporate profits over the long term.

On Holding’s stock that trades in the United States jumped 8.6 per cent after the Swiss sneaker and sportswear company unveiled its financial goals for upcoming years. It also approved a plan to buy back up to $US1 billion ($1.4 billion) of its stock through 2029. Such purchases send cash directly to investors and boost the company’s per-share performance.

On the losing end of Wall Street were several stocks of companies in the oil and gas industry, which were hurt by the drop in crude prices. ConocoPhillips fell 1.8 per cent.

Banks also dropped, continuing their weak run since last week, when the Federal Reserve raised the overnight interest rate that it controls for the first time in three years. When the spread narrows between short-term interest rates and longer ones, banks come under pressure because they make profit off the difference.

JPMorgan Chase fell 3.4 per cent and was one of the heaviest weights on the S&P 500.

The gap between short- and long-term yields in the bond market did not move much, as the 10-year Treasury yield held steady at 4.96 per cent from late Monday. Like oil prices, it also remains far above where it was before the war with Iran began, when it was at 3.97 per cent.

In stock markets abroad, indexes ticked higher across much of Europe and Asia. London’s FTSE 100 was an outlier and dipped 0.3 per cent.

Stocks rose 0.2 per cent in Hong Kong and 0.1 per cent in Shanghai after Alibaba unveiled new artificial intelligence chip technologies, including what it said was China’s most powerful AI chip. That comes just days ahead of a meeting between Chinese and US leaders at which competition to lead on AI technology is expected to be a major theme.

AP

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