The best performing large cap stock on the ASX this year isn’t a big bank or miner. It’s Woolworths. Next best is insurer QBE. Over the past month, the second-best performing stock on the ASX20 is gaming machine manufacturer Aristocrat Leisure.

Uncertainty around the trajectory for interest rates and commodities, spurred on by the Middle East war, has meant defensive stocks, and oversold stocks, have performed best at the big end of the market.

This is best highlighted by CSL, a defensive stock that had been oversold. It couldn’t find a friend a couple of months ago, and this year is off 29 per cent. But over the past month investors have been piling in, given how far its valuation fell. It is up 24 per cent since the middle of June, and is the best performing large cap.

Over the past month, the commodities players – BHP, Fortescue Metals, Rio Tinto and Woodside have all gone backwards, while Woolworths, QBE, Wesfarmers, Aristocrat alongside CSL have done well.

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Greed-o-meter

Disney may be regretting its rush to make a live-action version of the 2016 animated hit Moana. The live-action version opened over the weekend to a dismal $US43 million in US box office takings, and $US95 million worldwide. The film, starring Dwayne Johnson and Australian Catherine Laga'aia, cost an estimated $250 million to produce. Disney called the takings a 'good start,' but commentators suggest it might have come too close behind the animated sequel Moana 2, which hit theatres in 2024, and only a decade after the original made more than $643 million at the box office. In terms of opening weekends, the new Moana is a long way from setting records. It currently sits at 405th on the list of the biggest US openings... just behind the opening weekend for Will Smith's 2005 romcom Hitch. Here are the top ten:

Source: BoxOfficeMojo

Fear & Greed Q+A today

The Magnificent Seven have dominated markets for a long time now. But history suggests they won't stay on top forever:

 

“If you look at the top twenty global tech companies today, they're extremely different from the group in 2000. In fact, there's only one company that's still on that list, and that's Microsoft.

 

So if you fast forward to 2035, we should expect a majority of today's titans to fall off that list and be displaced by new companies—companies that aren't unicorns today, maybe companies we haven't even heard of yet.

 

They'll probably come from industries like autonomous vehicles, robotics, drones, space, batteries, sensors and rare earths. We should expect a very different group of companies because that's typically what happens during a major technology wave.”

News in brief

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says Labor has gone to the “edges” of the law to keep ISIS fighters and brides from returning to Australia, and the government cannot lower the threshold for issuing temporary exclusion orders any further.

The federal government will begin rolling out the Australia Travel Declaration, a digital replacement of the orange incoming passenger cards that you fill in (with a pen!) when entering the country.

The battle to create a top 50 ASX listed gold company appears over, with Genesis Minerals set to take over Vault Minerals in a $12.6 billion deal.

Xero chief executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy has sold all her shares in the company, in a $2 million transaction that comes amid a plan to reset her pay package to be less dependent on the struggling stock price.

Netflix, the king of streaming, is considering adding live channels to boost dropping engagement and prevent subscription cancellations, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Fear-o-meter

Ten Cap's Jason Todd on the ASX:

"It might seem dreary to remain cautious, but there is a lot of action going on below the headline index level. In a rising market, what you don’t own is not particularly important because the sheer weight of stocks moving higher lifts all boats. In a rangebound market, the opposite is true. There are fewer stocks moving higher, so avoiding the underperformers becomes just as important as identifying the winners. We think this dynamic will persist until the conditions are in place to position for the next upswing.

We have been cautious on Australian equities and we maintain that stance. While there are pockets of support beneath the surface, the domestic backdrop presents a number of meaningful headwinds that we think will keep the ASX200 bouncing within its twelve month trading range of 8,400 to 9,100 for some time yet. We are conscious that being cautious has now become a consensus call and that does make us a little nervous, because the consensus has had a poor track record in recent years. But there is a time to be anti-consensus, and while we are happy to back ourselves against the crowd, we don’t think the current risk-reward balance argues for that now."

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