KEY POINTS:
PERTH - The Australian stock market closed in negative territory following a weak lead from Wall Street and mixed commodity prices overnight.
At the close, the benchmark S&P/ASX200 index was down 20.2 points at 6145.8, while the all ordinaries index dropped 18.1 points to 6140.2.
At 1621 AEST on the Sydney Futures Exchange, the June share price index contract was nine points lower at 6165 on a volume of 17,096 contracts.
Austock Brokers senior client adviser Michael Heffernan said a combination of mixed commodity prices and a flat lead from Wall Street drove the market lower.
"When you've got no leads from the US, commodity prices were pretty mixed, there's no major news coming out ... there's nothing else that really drives the market," he said.
"It is just the ebbs and flows of the market, you can't keep increasing every day ... even though the market's down, it is just a statistical discrepancy really."
Mr Heffernan said that although the market closed in negative territory, nothing could take the shine off a solid result from St George Bank.
"It has been a bit of a down day today ... but that masks a number of interesting things that are happening and one was the stellar performance by St George Bank, which probably surprised a lot of people," he said.
St George Bank gained 64 cents to A$36.65 after it posted 14 per cent lift in first-half earnings and increased its guidance for the full year.
The other banks were mixed.
Westpac picked up 15 cents to A$27.20, ANZ dropped 20 cents to A$30.40, National Australia Bank shed five cents to A$42.95 and the Commonwealth Bank was steady at A$52.76.
US stocks closed lower on Monday as investors locked in profits at the end of Wall Street's strongest month in three years.
Locally, the big miners were weaker and BHP Billiton retreated 36 cents to A$29.15, while rival Rio Tinto slipped A$1.72 lower to A$81.15.
Pathology, medical centres and drugs distributor Symbion Health surged 18 cents to A$4.29 after it received an unsolicited takeover proposal from a private equity consortium valuing the company at A$2.78 billion.
Project developer Leighton Holdings dropped two cents to A$34.80 after announcing that its subsidiary Leighton Contractors would join five other companies working on the A$450 million rail line duplication project in Sydney's south-west.
The retailers were mixed. Coles added two cents to A$17.27, Woolworths shed four cents to A$28.26 and David Jones dropped seven cents to A$4.90.
The media sector was weaker. News Corp dropped 49 cents to A$29.13, its non-voting shares shed 60 cents to A$27.20, Fairfax lost 11 cents to A$5.12 and the James Packer-led PBL fell 18 cents to A$20.32.
SP Telemedia put on 4.5 cents to A$1.01 after it announced it would sell its media assets, including television station NBN Television, to PBL Media for A$250 million.
The energy sector was mixed. Woodside gained eight cents to A$39.50 while Oil Search retreated four cents to A$3.54.
Santos put on 38 cents to A$11.62 after the South Australian government announced a review of a 28-year-old law limiting individual shareholder ownership in an oil and gas company to 15 per cent.
The spot gold price at 1629 AEST was trading at US$678.40 an ounce, down US25 cents on yesterday's close.
The gold miners were weaker, and Newcrest dropped 81 cents to A$22.45, Newmont fell 12 cents to A$5.06 and Lihir Gold gave up five cents to A$2.93.
Food and beverage manufacturer Goodman Fielder was the most traded stock, with 95 million shares changing hands worth A$221.5 million.
Goodman Fielder dropped five cents to A$2.35.
Preliminary market turnover was 1.76 billion shares worth A$5.72 billion, with 445 stocks up, 816 down and 353 unchanged.
- AAP