KEY POINTS:
The local sharemarket started the week in modestly positive form, shrugging off a flat Friday night on Wall St.
The NZSX-50 benchmark index closed up 0.3 per cent or 13.25 points to 3644.48. Rises outpaced falls by 67 to 35 on mild turnover worth $86 million.
The market was "quietly firm, set against the fact that Wall St didn't run that strongly on Friday night in light of [employment data] which heightened the level of concern about the state of the US economy and whether it's near recession," First NZ Capital research manager Barry Lindsay said.
Top stock Telecom rose 3c to 406 a fter nearly a week of modest improvements. Brokers said the stock could be picking up ahead of an investor day for institutional investors.
Another good performer of late is Sky City, which today gained 14c to 409, from 346 two weeks ago. The stock has risen 17 per cent after being hammered over the end of potential takeover actio n and a major writedown in its cinema business.
The company's new chief executive was making a positive impression, one broker suggested.
Infratil was flat at 214 but traded strongly on $10m worth of shares.
ANZ led the Australian financial sector down, as it revealed the extent to which it had loaned money to interests of collapsed stock brokerage Opes, and strengthened its bad loan provisions.
ANZ closed down 172 to 2583 and Westpac fell 117 to 2838.
Fletcher Building, which lost 21c on Friday, made early gains, ending up 4c to 860 as the company enters a housing downturn.
Vector rose 7c to 183 after media reports that a Chinese company was one of three potential bidders for its Wellington network.
Other moves included GPG down 3c to 172, Goodman Properties flat at 138, Contact Energy down 5c to 859, Auckland Airport up 3c to 225, Tower down a cent to 189, Skellerup up 4c to 85c and NZOG up a cent to 143.
Pike River was one of the day's best performers by percentage, up 7c to 117 after world coking coal prices pushed through US$300 a tonne.
In Australia, shares rose 0.2 per cent as resource firms rose on stronger oil and metals prices, but ANZ and other banks fell on worries over more writedowns for bad assets.
The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index rose 13.5 points to
5633.1 by 0344 GMT (4.44pm NZT), after rising 5 per cent last week to log its biggest weekly rise since August 2007.
Wall St was flat on Friday as nagging fears about more bank losses and the biggest monthly decline in the job market in five years overshadowed earlier optimism that the credit crisis may be easing.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 16.61 points, or 0.13 per cent, to end at 12,609.42. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was up 1.09 points, or 0.08 per cent, at 1370.40.
However, the Nasdaq Composite Index was up 7.68 points, or 0.32 per cent, at 2370.98, capping its best week since August 2006, as investors saw value in Google shares. Google shares ha d lost 32 per cent since the start of the year but rose 3.5 per cent on Friday.
"Investors are processing the fact that the economic data is confirming what everybody believes, which is that we're in a recession. There's real anxiety about the earnings picture," said Frederic Dickson, senior vice president and market strategist at D A Davidson & Co in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
- NZPA
