Will BEN’s positive earnings drive the banking sector higher? Does “positive announcement drift” actually work?

Good Morning,

China has had a big night in the medal tally, however, in about 20 minutes, our Aussie girls are going for Gold in the rugby 7s vs. New Zealand….

Go Aussies… Go…..!

Things are also heating up today, with Carsales.com, RKN, IOOF and REA reporting their FY results.

Yesterday, BEN reported better than expected earnings and lifted its dividend. On the back of the +surprise, we were buying the stock as believe it will trend higher.

We will closely keep an eye on today’s reports and like CCP and DOW, see the +earnings surprises as a strong correlation to lift the stock prices higher over coming days….

There is empirical evidence to suggest that the “positive earnings drift” will send stock prices that outperform, higher, following the release of their news

so stay tuned for some PEAK ACTIVE alerts.

So what happened last night?

U.S. equities closed slightly lower on Monday (Dow -15 points), despite a rise in oil prices (+2.92%), as investors awaited key retail sales data due later this week.

"What I'm looking for is to see if this [rotation between sectors] continues," said Adam Sarhan, CEO of Sarhan Capital. "Every day there seems to be" a new sector leading the market.

The benchmark S&P 500 fell about 0.1 percent, led lower by health care. Energy, on the other hand, rose more than 1 percent. Earlier in the session, the S&P set a fresh all-time intraday high of 2,185.54.

The SPI is up 3 points this morning

Niv Dagan is an Executive Director of Melbourne based boutique funds management and corporate advisory firm, Peak Asset Management (www.peakassetmanagement.com.au). He is also a regular financial commentator on Sky Business