• The ASX closed higher on the back of lithium, retail and real estate stocks
  • MinRes is at all time high
  • Amazon’s AWS to invest billions in Melbourne facilities

 

The ASX closed 0.5% higher as Mining and Real Estate stocks pushed the index ever closer to the psychological 7,500 level.

At the close of Tuesday, the benchmark ASX 200 was at 7,492.

Lithium miners were once again the prime focus for investors as UBS economists upgraded their lithium price forecasts.

“We believe lithium markets will remain in deficit for the near and medium term before moving to structural deficit long term,” said Lachlan Shaw of UBS.

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Shaw also gave Buy ratings to lithium stocks Mineral Resources (ASX:MIN), Pilbara Minerals (ASX:PLS) and IGO (ASX:IGO), lifting the three stocks’ prices by around 5% each.

MinRes had earlier touched an all time high of of $96.09 before retreating to $95.97.

The Aussie dollar also jumped to US70.30 alongside the miners rally as currency traders placed bets on another potential commodity boom.

In stock news, retailer Myer (ASX:MYR) jumped 5% after posting its best sales figures in almost 20 years.

Myer increased its sales by 25% vs the pcp for the 5 months ending 31 December. Its store sales increased by 38% while online sales surged 9%.

The report comes as consumer confidence in Australia decreased by 1.8 points last week to 85.9, according to a survey by the ANZ.

“Media coverage of the inflation data and the first RBA meeting of 2023, which we expect to result in a cash rate hike, could both be headwinds for confidence in coming weeks,” said ANZ Senior Economist, Adelaide Timbrell.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s AWS cloud business said it has plans to invest $6.8 billion into data centres in Victoria by 2037.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region will provides customers with more options to run workloads with even greater resilience and availability, securely store data in Australia, and serve end users with even lower latency.

Current AWS customers down under include the likes of ANZ Bank, LittlePay, RMIT University, and PEXA Group.

 

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Breville Group (ASX:BRG) surged 8% on the back of retail sentiment.

Diversified retail group Premier Investments (ASX:PMV) also rose 4% on sentiment.

 

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