Welcome to Tuesday. Here are the five things I'm looking at today on the Australian sharemarket.
- The S&P/ ASX 200 Index (Index: ^AXJO) (ASX: XJO) has opened higher, despite falls on US markets overnight. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.15%, while the broader S&P 500 lost 0.3%. The falls have been attributed to declines in energy companies as oil prices tumbled.
Pullbacks are healthy – as Bruce Bittles, chief investment strategist at RW Baird & Co told Bloomberg, "You generally don't continue to grow forever."Never a truer word has been spoken. Trees don't grow to the sky as they say.
- ASX-listed nickel miners have surged in early trading, after the Philippines passed a bill through its lower house requiring all minerals extracted in the country to be processed prior to export. Nickel prices zoomed higher on the London Metals Exchange overnight, rising to more than US$19,000 per tonne. Mincor Resources NL (ASX: MCR), Poseidon Nickel Ltd (ASX: POS), Western Areas Ltd (ASX: WSA) and Independence Group NL (ASX: IGO) have all soared more than 1.5% higher.
Poseidon Nickel has surged more than 192% since we wrote this article in April this year. - Pallets group Brambles Limited (ASX: BXB) has announced the acquisition of UK-based Ferguson Group for £320 million as it looks to expand its specialist containers business. Ferguson provides over 18,000 containers to the offshore oil and gas industry to transport products and equipment.
The market doesn't appear to like the move much, with Brambles shares trading down 0.5% in early trade. - Tweet of the Day.
CommSec Research finds that $20.3 billion will be paid as dividends by listed companies from late Aug to mid November.^CJ #ozearnings
CommSec (@CommSec) September 9, 2014
Will those funds find their way back into high yielding fully franked dividend stocks? More than likely, I'd say. - Stock of the Day – brought to you by Andrew Mudie – is actually three small caps that could be future ASX giants. They have exciting potential and I own one of them and I'm considering another. You can read more here.
