Australian Investment Blog

A fairly choppy week for the ASX with the US interest rate hike and press conference headlining the action while we also saw some slight tightening by Chinese policy makers which the market took in its stride – all up the market grinded higher in aggregate, putting on 24 points or 0.42% overall. 5800 continues to tease with some of the more cocky at MM making some bullish bets that we’d close the week above that frustratingly stubborn level, only to see the market finish today’s session at 5799.6!

Today we had a flat open, decent buying for much of the session however unlike yesterday, we saw some selling leading into the close…a range of +/- 38 points, a high of 5815, a low of 5777 and a close of 5799, up +13pts or +0.24%.

ASX 200 Intra-Day Chart

ASX 200 Daily Chart

One stock that caught our eye today was Ramsay Healthcare (RHC) – a stock we recently bought and one that’s been under some pressure in the last few days. We talked about the stock in the Weekly Video yesterday (which unfortunately looked like it was filmed in the dead of night), suggesting that a quality stock that gets caught up by short term issues creates opportunity. Today the stock bounced +4.19% to close back up at $65.20. We like RHC at this juncture and would add to our holding if it trades back to ~$60.

Ramsay Healthcare (RHC) Daily Chart

We made some difficult calls in terms of the MM portfolio today selling 3 portfolio holdings and closing out one trade. One of the key differences in the MM service, is that we have real money in the market and therefore we have the same limitations as you and I – without endless amounts of fictitious funds that slosh around fictitious ‘model’ portfolios. Within our portfolio, cash levels were low (6%) which reduces our flexibility to take advantage of opportunities when / if they arise. We typically like to have ~15% available to take advantage of money making instances when they pop up and even though we remain positive on the overall market, today we elected to increase cash and reduce our exposure to a weakening US currency.

CSL; A quality stock with good future growth, however it’s now overbought in the short term. We sold our 5% holding today at $123.50 locking in a profit of ~13.6%

CSL Daily Chart

Macquarie (MQG); A stock we like and have held for around 4 months now, but our overexposure in the Financials (which has serviced us well to date) and Macquarie’s $US exposure prompted us to take an ~8.2% profit on our 4% allocation to MQG at $88.67 today.

Macquarie (MQG) Daily Chart

Altium (ALU); Again, another stock we still quite like however it’s a longer term growth play and at this stage, we think higher valued growth will struggle as interest rates go higher …we took a small loss on our 4% holding in ALU of ~4.2%.

Altium (ALU) Daily Chart

TPG Telecom (TPM); A combination of their half yearly results due on Tuesday and the upcoming auction for spectrum early April creates a higher level of short term risk in that stock…We closed out for a small profit today.

Have a great night,

The Market Matters Team

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All figures contained from sources believed to be accurate. Market Matters does not make any representation of warranty as to the accuracy of the figures and disclaims any liability resulting from any inaccuracy. Prices as at 17/03/2017. 5.00PM.
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