Agriculture and Innovation lead Australian share market

- Live panel discussion in Sydney 15th March –

Next Thursday evening I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on bubbles and trends.

We’ll cover Investment bubbles, Property and Cryptos through to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The panel consists of ex-Atlassian technology lead developers, fund managers and media moguls.

If you would like to attend, you can register for free here

Economy and Indices

The AU market remains unpredictable after a volatile reporting season, being the month of February.

The safest place for investing has been in the growth companies; the smaller-mid sized companies. The catch is that these companies are inherently more volatile than blue-chips.

The stand-out companies have been agriculture and technology companies.

Leading Sectors This Month

Health Care +6% (off the back of CSL’s market-leading report)
Info Tech +0%
Consumer Staples (grocers) -1.1%

Bottom Sectors

Energy -9% (yes, that’s two consecutive months at -9%)
Utilities -6.5% (last month was -8.3%)

Segments this Month

After three months in pole positions, Emerging Companies are now the worst performers this month – these are the group of the smallest companies on the ASX.

Mid-cap companies are the strongest this month. Stand-out names are A2 Milk (A2M), Flight Centre (FLT), Seek (SEK) and two gold miners - North Star (NST) and Evolution Mining (EVN)

The rest of the market was congested around the same performance in-between these two groups.

Market Trends

Disruption from the depths has been the standout theme from top performing companies in 2018 thus far.

From A2 Milk (A2M) carving out their own market niche through to software designer Altium (ALU). The majority of top performing share on the ASX for 2018 have forced their way to the top through innovation and changing the status quo in their industry.

The only exceptions have been CSL, the blood products and health-care leader and travel companies (FLT, WEB, CTD and QAN)

Market Leaders

Agriculture, Gold miners, Technology and Mining Services are still leading.

For discussion about these leaders, see the latest episode of Talking Stock.

Podcasts

I regularly interview industry exports on numerous topics - available in the Podcast playlist here

For an analyst’s view on Australia’s listed property trusts (LPTs or A-REITs) watch the Torpedo Tuesday interview Hugh Dive;
For chart Analysis of the US markets, the AU markets and a few shorter-term trading opportunities see the webcast with Gary Glover and his charts.
For a wrap up for February 2018 reporting season, watch Rudi Tuesday