NZ stocks: Market buoyant, but watching Australia

12.00pm

The New Zealand sharemarket had a firm tone today, with Telecom and Air New Zealand leading the charge.

By mid-morning the NZSE-40 capital index was up 16.70 points, or 0.84 per cent, at 2008.80 after a hefty rally on Wall Street on Friday.

However, Sam Macdonald of Direct Broking said New Zealand was waiting to see how the Australian market would react to the bomb blast in Bali during the weekend.

"It hasn't (had an effect) yet, it's a bit of an unknown quantity for us at the moment," Mr Macdonald said.

"The general tone on the market's very good for a Monday. On the back of a big bounce in the United States, our market's reasonably buoyant this morning."

US stocks had their first weekly gain in seven weeks on Friday, following on from rises in European markets.

"It's one of the stronger turning signals from US markets that we've had, (but) it could be just a short rally.

"Telecom's pretty heavily leveraged on the US market at the moment, the outlook of all markets. Everyone said that once that Verizon stake was gone it would just run (up) -- the only thing that's held it back was some weak soggy markets. If the markets do balance here we'll see Telecom at 550 by the end of the week," he said.

By mid-morning Air NZ was up 3c at 56, Sky City gained 9c to a fresh high of 749, and Telecom was up 6c at 512.

AMP continued its rebound to climb a further 18c this morning to 1363, Baycorp Advantage gained 12c to 332, Carter Holt Harvey was up 1c at 164, Guinness Peat Group rose 1c to 152, and The Warehouse was up 3c at 728.

Contact Energy gained 3c to 385, Powerco rose 6c to 186, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare was up 5c at 990 and its sister stock F&P Appliances rose 15c to 1000.

Auckland Airport, which goes ex-dividend today to the tune of 7.5c per share, was down 5c at 426, Pacific Retail lost 3c to 295 on light turnover, BIL International was down 1c at 57 and Steel & Tube shed 5c to 290.

There were 43 rises and 22 falls on the 95 stocks traded.

Turnover of 8.37 million stocks valued at $24.87 million was topped by Telecom's 2.55 million stocks worth $13.02 million.

On Wall St, the blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average jumped 316.34 points, or 4.20 per cent, to 7850.29; the broad Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose 31.40 points, or 3.91 per cent, to 835.32; and the Nasdaq Composite Index soared 47.11 points, or 4.05 per cent, to 1210.48.

US government offices are closed today for the Columbus Day holiday, delaying the release of some economic data.

- NZPA