By Mark Woodruff
Guide:
The FNArena database tabulates the views of seven major Australian and international stock brokers: Citi, Credit Suisse, Macquarie, Morgan Stanley, Morgans, Ord Minnett and UBS.
For the purpose of broker rating correlation, Outperform and Overweight ratings are grouped as Buy, Neutral is grouped with Hold and Underperform and Underweight are grouped as Sell to provide a Buy/Hold/Sell (B/H/S) ratio.
Ratings, consensus target price and forecast earnings tables are published at the bottom of this report.
Summary
Total Upgrades: 10
Net Ratings Breakdown: Buy 54.85%; Hold 38.39%; Sell 6.76%
For the week ending Friday 7 May, there were ten upgrades and thirteen downgrades to ASX-listed companies by brokers in the FNArena database.
ASX closes at record high
Share
A casino bidding war and another surge in commodity prices powered the local sharemarket to a record closing high on Monday.
The S&P/ASX 200 Index ended the session up 92 points, or 1.3 per cent, at 7172.8, passing the previous record close of 7162.5 on February 20 last year.
Crown Resorts jumped 7.3 per cent to $13 on the back of news that it has received a proposal to merge with The Star Entertainment Group by way of a scheme of arrangement.
Star estimated that a merger with Crown would result in indicative cost synergies of between $150 million and $200 million a year.
End of Month I
It was the end of the month, and it was a Friday, and the ASX200 had posted a rally for the month so no great surprise in some profit-taking. The extent of loss on Friday was nevertheless exacerbated by a handful of weak quarterly updates from individual companies.
The index gained 3.5% over April, with all of that coming in the first two weeks. Friday’s close ensured that after a lot of ups and downs, the index did not ultimately move in the second two weeks.
The big loser on the day was Beach Energy ((BPT)), down -24.1% after the company’s quarterly update included a reserve downgrade. The energy sector fell -1.7% to be the worst performer.