The week’s slump left the flagship Australian index down by 1.8 per cent since the start of the month by close of play on Friday. The final price for the week was 7,406.6.
The dip seen was exacerbated by the exchange’s worst day in nine months on Thursday, where news of NSW’s reopening plan did little to stop a crash of 1.9 per cent.
Speaking on their end-of-day podcast on Friday, CommSec said this “easily has dragged us into negative territory for the week”.
Analysing trends for the week, miners proved to be the worst performers due to varying commodity prices, a trend seen through the start of September.
“This (a poor performance in mining) has been the case really for a few weeks now,” CommSec said.
The S&P/ASX 200 Resources sub-index (AS45) is down 5.17 per cent in the month to date.
“Part of the reason are commodity prices like iron ore which is still largely very volatile,” it said.
“They’ve fallen about 40, 45 per cent now since the middle of May when we saw iron ore hitting a record high.”
This is set to continue weighing down the sector at the start of this trading week.
At 6.30am on Monday, Ray Spires, Westpac market strategist, recorded iron ore prices at US$128, down further 1.1 per cent and hitting a nine-month low for the commodity.
However, the trading week was not all bad for miners, with improvements in other commodity prices bringing some respite towards its close.
“On Friday we saw copper and aluminium do quite well,” CommSec said at the market open on Monday.
“In fact, aluminium over the course of last week was up by around 7 per cent.”
Miners will be keenly watching economic data out of China on Wednesday as the sector looks to reverse its September fortunes so far.
“This might have ramifications for the commodities space,” CommSec said on Monday.
“If we see for example, some softer numbers here, that could suggest that perhaps, for the moment at least, some of the measures that the Chinese have employed in terms of engineering lower commodity prices might be at an end.
“That could have a bearing where iron ore prices are concerned.”
CommSec also noted that the recent mining crash was impacted by a number of companies going ex-dividend with large payouts to investors.
“We’ve had a number of big names trading ex-dividend,” the broker said on Friday.
“This week it was all FMG which was under the most pressure.
“It fell 11 per cent in one day on Monday (6 September), and that really was a major weight as well.”
Monday was the ex-dividend date for FMG, which had announced it would pay out a bumper dividend of $3.58 per share.
FMG closed the week at $18.270.
