ASX opens lower as Wall Street scuffles

The Australian sharemarket continued to see red on Friday as company figures weighed on investor sentiment, after stocks drifted lower on Wall Street on the back of a mixed batch of earnings reports.

The S&P/ASX 200 was down 28.9 points, or 0.4 per cent, to 7,461.4 at the open, as all sectors, except consumer staples and materials lost ground.

Information technology (down 1.3 per cent), utilities (down 1.2 per cent) and energy (down 1.1 per cent) were the biggest weights on the index. Coal majors New Hope Corporation, Yancoal and Whitehaven lost 8.3 per cent, 6.9 per cent and 5.7 per cent each, despite the first shipment of the commodity in two years docking in China on Thursday.

Property services group REA shed 3 per cent after it reported a 9 per cent fall in national residential new listings in January as interest rates continued to depress consumer sentiment and property prices.

Consumer staples (up 0.1 per cent) lifted the index, and materials which traded flat, as heavyweight BHP gained 0.7 per cent on the back of a 1.6 per cent increase in iron ore prices.

In the US, stocks have been shaky this week, flipping between gains and losses amid uncertainty about where interest rates and inflation are heading

The S&P 500 was 0.9 per cent lower at the close, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 0.7 per cent. The Nasdaq lost 1 per cent.

A still-strong jobs market has investors buying more into the Fed’s forecast that it will hike rates a couple more times before holding them at a high level through this year. High rates can drive down inflation but also raise the risk of a recession and hurt investment prices.

A narrowing disconnect between markets and the Fed could lead to less volatility in markets in the future, said Thomas Martin, senior portfolio manager at Globalt Investments. But for now, with a jumble of earnings reports pouring in from companies and questions remaining about whether the economy can avoid a sharp recession, swings are likely to remain.