Australian shares are expected to fall on Friday as the profit reporting season ends, defying a stronger night on Wall Street.
Harvey Norman Holdings (ASX: HVN), Steadfast Group (ASX: SDF), Paladin Energy (ASX: PDN) and Boss Energy (ASX: BOE) are among the companies scheduled to announce results to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).
Futures trading points to a 0.3% drop in the S&P/ASX 200 index at 10:00 am AEST (12:00 am GMT Thursday) with the September share price index contract quoted 30 points below the previous settlement at 8,928 at the time of writing.
This would more than erase the gains in the Australian market on Thursday when the price benchmark rose 19.5 points or 0.22% to 8,980 as investors responded to the latest earnings results.
It also runs counter to the direction of stocks in the United States, where benchmark averages finished higher on Thursday (Friday AEST), with the S&P 500 closing above 6,500 points.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.2%, the S&P 500 0.3% and the Nasdaq Composite 0.5%.
Investor spirits were lifted by quarterly results from technology giant Nvidia, which they interpreted as confirmation that demand was still strong for artificial intelligence related (AI) technology.
"Nvidia is such an outlier that to say it was a disappointing print is only against the bar of borderline impossible expectations," Baird Investment Strategy analyst Ross Mayfield was quoted in a Reuters story as saying.
"It's clear that the primary structural driver of this market, which is AI, is not going anywhere or cooling down."
Burrell Stockbroking wealth adviser Adam Dight said the profit season had divided companies into A and B teams based on how their results compared with market expectations and how investors responded.
“You've either beaten the market or you haven't and if you haven't you’re torched,” Dight said.
On the fixed interest markets, yields fell with 10-year and 2-year Government bond rates slipping 0.05% to 4.282% and 0.12% to 3.334% respectively.
