ASX rises as investors shrug off Trump tariffs; Seven West jumps

Energy stocks were mixed as oil prices steadied following their biggest advance in almost four weeks as tighter Russian crude supply overshadowed concerns over the fallout from Trump’s tariffs. West Texas Intermediate traded above $US72 a barrel after rising nearly 2 per cent on Monday, while Brent rose 1.6 per cent to $US75.87. Woodside Energy rose 0.6 per cent, Santos slid 0.2 per cent and Ampol dipped 0.1 per cent.

Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media and its parent Seven Group Holdings surged 4.2 per cent and 5.1 per cent, respectively, after the media conglomerate said it saw the advertising market improving in the current quarter and expected “modest growth” in earnings for the June half from a year earlier, helped by the AFL and the federal election campaign. Its underlying profits were down 41 per cent at $37 million in the December half.

The local market gains mirrored Wall Street’s, which also seemed to take the looming tariffs in stride and kicked the new week off with a gain. Overnight in New York, the S&P 500 climbed 0.7 per cent to end at 6,066.44 points, coming off a losing week that was book-ended by worries about how potential tariffs could push up inflation and threaten the world’s largest economy.

The Dow Jones added 0.4 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite was 1 per cent higher as Nvidia and other Big Tech stocks led the way.

US metals producers that would benefit from steel and aluminium tariffs rallied. Nucor, US Steel and Steel Dynamics rose more than 4 per cent each. Cleveland-Cliffs jumped 18 per cent, Century Aluminum rallied 10 per cent and Alcoa rose about 2 per cent.

Some companies that buy steel in their manufacturing were swinging, but less sharply. General Motors fell 1.5 per cent, Ford Motor lost 0.3 per cent and Caterpillar slipped 0.4 per cent.

AI chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom climbed 2.9 per cent and 4.5 per cent, respectively. Amazon gained 1.7 per cent. Heavyweight technology stocks fell sharply on Friday after Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on all countries, matching the tariffs levied by them.

Big Tech stocks had come under pressure last month after a Chinese upstart upended Wall Street’s artificial-intelligence boom by saying it had developed a large language model that could perform like the world’s best without having to use the most expensive, top-flight chips.

Despite the development by DeepSeek, big US companies have said since that they’re still planning to plow billions of dollars into their AI endeavours. That’s calmed worries that DeepSeek could have turned off a huge spigot of spending for the industry, at least for now.

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“Investors are basically saying: ‘hey, let’s go back into the areas that worked’. One reason that investors are optimistic, in my opinion, is because of earnings,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research.

Tesla ended down 3 per cent after the Wall Street Journal reported that a consortium of investors led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk is offering $US97.4 billion ($157 billion) to buy the nonprofit that controls artificial-intelligence startup OpenAI. The offer intensifies a longstanding battle between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk over the future of the startup at the heart of a boom in generative AI technology.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury stayed at 4.50 per cent. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which more closely tracks expectations for what the Federal Reserve will do with short-term interest rates, eased to 4.27 per cent from 4.29 per cent.

In other international markets, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia. Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 was virtually unchanged after Japan’s government reported a record current account surplus last year.

AP, Bloomberg

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