Good morning, and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog! I’ll be guiding you through the latest market action for the next few hours.
It looks like the local share market will start its day slightly higher. ASX futures, which are a rough indicator of how the market may open, have risen by about 0.2%.
The Australian dollar is hovering just below 70 US cents.
Oil prices jumped to a five-week high, with Brent crude futures up 2.5% to $US91.41 per barrel.
Despite that, Wall Street finished trading higher as beaten-down tech and semiconductor stocks rebounded sharply ahead of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Tesla and Intel reporting their earnings later this week.
Investors are keen to find out whether the ‘AI trade’ has more room to run, given sky-high profit expectations for the June quarter and beyond.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.7% to 52,225 points, the S&P 500 lifted 0.9% to 7,509 points and the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.3%, to 25,837 points.
Some of the notable gains were Sandisk (+14.3%), Western Digital (+12.5%) and Micron Technology (+12.2%).
Anyway, please grab a coffee, tea or whatever you normally have in the morning, and I’ll have more updates for you shortly!