Markets Overview
- ASX SPI 200 futures down 0.2% to 6,896.00
- Dow Average up 1.7% to 34,725.47
- Aussie down 0.6% to 0.6991 per US$
- U.S. 10-year yield fell 2.9bps to 1.7695%
- Australia 3-year bond yield fell 6bps to 1.41%
- Australia 10-year bond yield fell 8bps to 1.94%
- Gold spot down 0.3% to $1,791.53
- Brent futures up 0.8% to $90.03/bbl
Economic Events
- 11am: (AU) Jan. Melbourne Institute Inflation, prior 2.8%
- 11am: (AU) Jan. Melbourne Institute Inflation, prior 0.2%
- 11:30am: (AU) Dec. Private Sector Credit MoM, est. 0.6%, prior 0.9%, revised 0.9%
- 11:30am: (AU) Dec. Private Sector Credit YoY, est. 6.8%, prior 6.6%
Australia’s central bank will jettison its 15 month-old quantitative easing program and revise up its inflation forecasts, setting the stage for an interest-rate hike in the third quarter, economists say.
The Reserve Bank will keep its cash rate at 0.1% on Tuesday, while ending its A$4 billion ($2.8 billion) a week of bond purchases, a survey of economists showed. They now see a first rate hike coming in about six months’ time, well ahead of their previous view of early 2023 and the bank’s guidance of 2024.
Other News
Twitter has suspended a bot account that responded to posts about Wordle, an online word deduction game whose popularity has soared in recent weeks, with purported spoilers about the next day’s word.
The @wordlinator account appeared to automatically reply to tweets sharing results with a snarky message and the next answer — a pointed way to ruin the game because Wordle only changes the word once a day.
Twitter said it suspended the account because it allegedly violated the platform’s rules around sending high-volume unsolicited replies to other users. Accounts are not allowed “to disrupt others’ experience,” the company said Tuesday.
A Twitter user who appeared to take responsibility for creating the account did not respond to an interview request.
Wordle’s premise is simple: Players guess a five-letter word, with each letter filling a square. Those squares turn green, yellow or gray to indicate whether a letter is in the right space, in the word but in a different spot, or not in the word at all. Players have six tries to guess the right word, which is the same for everyone.
Scores of people have taken to social media to share the square emoji that show how they arrived at that day’s answer. Others have grumbled about the popular posts and muted the word “Wordle” to avoid them. And, apparently, at least one person was so aggravated that they created an account to ruin the game for others.
That bot may have discovered the upcoming words by reverse engineering Wordle’s algorithm. The words, each assigned to a date, are stored in a list located in players’ browsers, software engineer Robert Reichel explained in a Jan. 9 blog post.
