ASX makes slight gain as Wall Street drifts, tech stocks continue to rise

The Australian sharemarket continued its lacklustre performance for the first full trading week of the new year, making a muted showing on Thursday after shifting geopolitical risks caused US shares to waver overnight.

The S&P/ASX 200 edged up 25.2 points, or 0.3 per cent, to 8720 at close. Gains by tech and healthcare stocks held the bourse in the black, while miners wobbled. The flattish trade comes after a relatively slow week, with the overall market trading flat since Monday. The Australian dollar was trading at US67¢.

The ASX didn’t take any more direction from the balance of trade for November. Australia’s trade surplus narrowed to $2.94 billion, down from a revised $4.35 billion in October after a fall in iron ore exports, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said.

Tech stocks tracked overnight gains by the US tech giants, which benefited as this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas boosts optimism about the sector. WiseTech Global, Australia’s biggest tech stock, was up 2 per cent. Fellow software makers Xero and Technology One rose 1 per cent and 1.4 per cent, respectively. Data centre operator Next DC rose 0.9 per cent and family tracking app Life360 climbed 3.6 per cent.

Rises in healthcare stocks also added to the index. CSL gained 2.6 per cent and Sigma was up 0.7 per cent.

The big four banks were mixed. Commonwealth Bank, the biggest stock on the local market, traded flat while the remaining three big banks increased: ANZ was up 1 per cent, while Westpac grew 1.7 per cent and National Australia Bank rose 1 per cent.

The mining sector’s losses widened after the balance of trade figures. BHP and Fortescue Metals gave up early gains and were down 0.9 per cent and 0.4 per cent. Gold miners Northern Star (down 2.7 per cent) and Evolution Mining (down 1.7 per cent) declined and silver miner South32 shed 0.4 per cent after gold and silver prices softened overnight.

BlueScope Steel lost 1.7 per cent to $29.67 after the nation’s largest steelmaker knocked back a $13 billion takeover bid by Kerry Stokes’ industrial group SGH and US steel giant Steel Dynamics last night, dismissing their $30-a-share offer as “an attempt to take BlueScope from its shareholders on the cheap”.

Ansell shares dropped 6.2 per cent after the rubber gloves maker said its chief executive, Neil Salmon, would retire after 13 years with the company. He will be replaced next month by Finnish executive Nathalie Ahlström.

James Hardie slumped 3.4 per cent, mirroring sharp losses by US home builders after President Donald Trump suggested moves to prevent large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, to make it more affordable for people to buy houses. The potential removal of some buyers for homes weighed on the Australian building products maker as three-quarters of its sales are in the US.

On Wall Street overnight, optimism faded after Trump’s latest flurry of social media posts sent home builders and defence contractors tumbling. Valero Energy led shares of refiners higher after Trump said Venezuela would turn over millions of barrels of oil to the US.

The S&P 500 Index slid 0.4 per cent after notching its second intraday record of 2026, while the Nasdaq 100 edged up 0.2 per cent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.9 per cent from its own record set the day before.

Northrop Grumman slid 5.5 per cent and Lockheed Martin lost 4.8 per cent after Trump said he would not permit dividends or stock buybacks for defence companies until they fix problems with the production of military equipment. He didn’t mention specific companies.

Meanwhile, tech stocks continued their gains. Nvidia and Microsoft rose about 1 per cent each, and Alphabet rose more than 2 per cent as investors shifted back into AI stocks following recent worries they were overvalued.

“Investors have come into 2026 with a similar playbook to last year: Buy tech and forget about it. Rumours that the AI trade was done turned out not to be true,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Moves across the rest of the US sharemarket were mostly quiet, including for Warner Bros Discovery after it again rejected a buyout bid from Paramount and told its shareholders to stick with a rival offer from Netflix. Warner Bros rose 0.3 per cent, while Paramount Skydance fell 0.9 per cent and Netflix added 0.1 per cent.

In the oil market, crude prices fell after Trump said Venezuela would provide 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States. A barrel of benchmark US crude dropped 2 per cent to $US55.99. Brent crude, the international standard, fell a more modest 1.2 per cent to settle at $US59.96 per barrel.

Any additional oil flowing from Venezuela into the global system would push down on crude prices by increasing their supplies. Prices for oil have swung this week following Trump’s weekend ouster of the president of Venezuela, which is likely to be sitting on some of the largest deposits of oil in the world.

Oil prices had already fallen back to where they were in 2021, before Trump’s move against Venezuela, because of expectations of plentiful supplies. To pull much more oil from Venezuela’s ground would likely require big investments to improve ageing infrastructure.

In the bond market, Treasury yields swung following several mixed reports on the US economy. One of the most impactful said that growth for US retailers, finance companies and other businesses in the services sectors accelerated by more last month than economists expected.

Separate reports on the US job market offered a mixed view. One said that employers cut back on the number of job openings they were advertising, while a second suggested that employers outside of the government added 41,000 more jobs last month than they cut. A much more comprehensive look at the health of the US job market will arrive on Friday.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.13 per cent from 4.18 per cent following Wednesday’s economic reports. But the two-year yield, which more closely tracks expectations for what the Fed will do, held steadier. It edged down to 3.46 per cent from 3.47 per cent from late Tuesday.

The hope on Wall Street is that the economy remains solid enough to avoid a recession but not so strong that it keeps the Fed from cutting interest rates. The Fed cut its main interest rate three times last year to shore up the slowing job market, but it has indicated fewer cuts may be ahead because inflation remains high.

Traders are betting on a less than 12 per cent chance that the Fed will cut interest rates at its next meeting later this month. That’s down slightly from the day before, according to data from CME Group.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed among some sharp moves across Europe and Asia.

With AP and Bloomberg