News

November 15, 2008

That Was The Week That Was ... In Australia

By Our Man in Oz

Minews. Good morning Australia. Is there any good news to report, or is it all gloom?

Oz. Mainly gloom, but with flashes of hope, as our friend Richard Elman emphasised midweek with his observation that he was “seeing the bottom” in the commodities downturn. The unanswered question leading on from that remark is how long will the turn take? - because the news from China, which is the driver of demand, remains rather flat. On our market here in Australia, the week started out positively, and then the indexes sank lower, until a late burst of optimism on Friday. The net result was a 6.1 per cent decline in the metals index and a 6.9 per cent decline in the all ordinaries, a measure of the uniformly weaker nature of the market.

Minews. Did any sector perform better than the rest?

Oz. Gold produced a handful of winners, but the trend was down, as it was with most other sectors. The twin bulks of iron ore and coal weakened across the board, as did the base metals. To find a collection of stocks moving against the downward trend you had to look at speciality and situation stocks. Tungsten, phosphate and manganese caught the attention of a few buyers, but the most interesting upward move came from copper explorer,...