Good Afternoon and welcome to this edition of HotCopper’s Market Close for Monday 2nd of June 2025, I’m Jon Davidson.
The ASX200 ended down a quarter of a percent as the Australian market digested Wall Street’s Friday finish, informed by renewed trade uncertainty.
Looking at sectors, telecomms were the winner of the day up point four percent; energy was the day’s biggest laggard down -1.4%.
But some companies did have a green day.
The big ticket item was Washington H Soul Pattison’s merger with Brickworks to create a $14B dollar company catering to real estate and construction. Soul Pattison is one of the oldest companies on the ASX, operating since 1903, and the move was particularly good news for Brickworks holders. The deal is valued at the same as James Hardie’s takeover of USA-based AZEK, however, the market was far more in favor of this deal than the latter.
Elsewhere, Dateline Resources had another day of massive gains, up 50%, as the company believes it has found strong evidence pointing to rare earth mineralisation on-site its Collosseum project in the USA. The market liked that news because Donald Trump himself namedropped the company’s project on Truth Social in relatively recent history.
Finally, talking of Trump, Bluescope Steel was a winner as the American President threatened to double existing tariffs on steel and aluminum from 25% to 50%, which is good news in the eyes of Bluescope investors, because a lot of its sales are in the US – meaning it will probably be charging higher prices.
And so let’s look at the reds,
Mineral Resources fell -10% below $20 a share as the company was hit by lower iron ore prices, the steelmaking feedstock hit US$95 per tonne on Monday as renewed fears around a Chinese-US trade war put downside pressure on hopes for Chinese steel demand to return to something approximating pre-COVID levels.
Elsewhere, Alcoa proved to be the opposite of Bluescope when it came to Trump’s latest steel and aluminum tariff threats, the company sunk nearly -4.5% after investors interpreted higher aluminum tariffs in the US as bad news for the company.
Finally, Commonwealth Bank ended the day flattish red down just 2 pips, outperforming peers NAB and Westpac as the big banks all took a red dip following the Friday Wall Street session. BHP also fell on Monday.
That’s HotCopper’s Market Close for Monday June 2nd, I’m Jon Davidson, have a great night and we’ll see you on Tuesday.