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Welcome to your five-minute recap of the trading day and how the experts saw it.
The numbers: The Australian sharemarket’s four-day run of gains ended on Wednesday with a 0.9 per cent fall.
The ASX 200 was down sharply early in the day, falling 1.4 per cent just past midday but clawed some territory back with the help of the energy and financials sectors, which closed in the green.
Real estate tanked by 3.5 per cent and tech lost 2.6 per cent.
The bigger-than-expected drop in consumer confidence helped send Wall Street stocks sharply lower.Credit:AP
The lifters: Liontown Resources 5.2%, Star Entertainment Group 3.3%, Aurizon 3.2%
The laggards: Imugene -14%, Carsales.com -9.6%, Silver Lake Resources -8.2%
The lowdown: Wall Street and the Australian sharemarket rose earlier this week as China relaxed lockdown restrictions and investor sentiment improved, but plunging consumer confidence figures in the US drove local markets down on Wednesday for the first time in four sessions.
The sharemarket’s decline followed broad losses on Wall Street, spooked by US consumer confidence hitting its lowest in about a year and a half.
Conversely, retail spending increased in Australia for the fifth consecutive month in May with a 0.9 per cent rise, double the forecast increase. The Australian Bureau of Statistics said resilient shoppers splashed $34.2 billion on retail, up 10 per cent on May 2021, although inflation drove prices higher and this was reflected in the increased retail spending.