Markets Overview

  • ASX SPI 200 futures down 0.4% to 6,812.00
  • Dow Average up 0.6% to 32,020.92
  • Aussie down 0.6% to 0.6460 per US$
  • U.S. 10-year yield fell 7.1bps to 3.9331%
  • Australia 3-year bond yield fell 11 bps to 3.37%
  • Australia 10-year bond yield fell 8.8 bps to 3.83%
  • Gold spot down 0.2% to $1,661.71
  • Brent futures up 1.4% to $96.99/bbl

Economic Events

  • 11:00: (AU) Australia to Sell A$800 Million 1.75% 2032 Bonds
  • 11:30: (AU) 3Q PPI QoQ, prior 1.4%
  • 11:30: (AU) 3Q PPI YoY, prior 5.6%

Wall Street contended with another volatile session as investors mulled the Federal Reserve’s path of interest-rate hikes while assessing mixed economic data and a slew of earnings reports.

Amazon.com Inc. plunged after hours as its sales forecast trailed estimates. Shares of Apple Inc. also fell postmarket after the firm reported less-than-anticipated service and iPhone revenue.

The S&P 500 closed lower, after swinging between gains and losses for most of the session. The Nasdaq 100 fell more than 1% in regular trading and an exchange-traded fund tracking it slid further after 4 p.m. in New York. Lackluster earnings from several megacap firms this week dampened sentiment and underscored the impact of the Fed’s tightening regime. Meta Platforms Inc. suffered its worst one-day drop since February on Thursday, triggered by burgeoning metaverse costs and a decline in revenue.

Markets were also mixed on US gross domestic product data. The report showed the US economy rebounded after two quarterly contractions, which briefly assuaged concerns of an imminent recession. But it also highlighted that consumer spending remains under pressure because of inflation. Treasuries gained, with the 10-year yield pushing below 4% on speculation of a Fed pivot. The dollar snapped a two-day drop.

Other News

If you have trouble spelling words like ‘calendar,’ ‘arctic,’ and ‘niece,’ you are certainly not alone – as new data obtained by Quillbot has revealed that hundreds of thousands of Americans are making spelling mistakes every month.

Using Google search data, the grammar checking website uncovered what the most commonly misspelled words in the US are – and disclosed just exactly how many times people were searching for the words incorrectly per month.

According to Quillbot, ‘calendar’ is the word that most people have trouble on, with the company revealing that every single month, 257,000 Google users search for the word ‘calender’ instead.

The word ‘arctic’ came in second place, with 87,000 Americans accidentally leaving the first C out of the word and writing ‘artic’ every month.

Based on the data, it appears that a mistake people often make when it comes to spelling is getting the I and the E mixed up in words like ‘niece,’ ‘receive,’ ‘believe,’ and ‘siege.’

Other commonly misspelled words include ‘separate,’ ‘rhythm,’ ‘occurred,’ ‘congratulations,’ ‘until,’ and ‘license.’

It appears that many Americans also have trouble spelling some common foods like broccoli and spaghetti – as the words ‘brocoli’ and ‘spagetti’ are searched 13,000 times each per month – while the state Connecticut was also on the list with 20,000 misspellings each month.

Experts blamed the population’s poor spelling on tools such as spellcheck and auto-correct, which both play a prominent role in modern-day living.

‘Many Americans struggle with spelling, especially in a digital age of spell checkers,’ a spokesperson from QuillBot said.

‘However, if you sometimes get your letters jumbled up, there are things you can do to improve your spelling.

‘Reading more frequently can improve your spelling. This is because you get to see the letters on a page in front of you.

‘Writing more often can also help with your spelling. Try using a dictionary every time you think you may have spelled a word wrong, and then highlight the word.

‘Slowly you will start to see an improvement in your spelling, especially for the words that we all struggle with.’

Back in 2009, a study of 2,000 US adults found that one in four admitted to having problems with spelling common words – and it’s only gotten worse since then.

In 2015, a UK survey revealed that only two-thirds of adults had the spelling level expected of elementary school children.

People taking part were asked to spell 35 different words taken from SAT tests over the prior three years.

1,000 adults aged between 16 and 77 were tested, and only 67 per cent achieved the grade four level, while less than half (44 per cent) got to level five; 15 per cent of the adults who participated failed to even reach level three, which is below the level expected of children at age 11.

(Daily Mail)