Category: 3. Business

A department store in Yokohama, near Tokyo, opened for the New Year on Friday, drawing crowds of shoppers seeking bargain packages known as “lucky bags.”

At Sogo Yokohama, many people lined up before the store opened at 9 a.m. Hoof-shaped sweets were handed out at the entrance, as the horse is the Chinese zodiac sign for 2026.

The department store says it is offering many lucky bags filled with essential daily items, such as clothing and food, as consumers remain cost-conscious amid rising prices. It has also increased the number of lucky bags by about 30 percent from last year.

A man in his 40s who visited the store with his 10-year-old child bought a bag of children’s clothing. He said it was helpful because the cost of clothes is high.

Many department store operators chose to keep their stores closed on New Year’s Day this year, citing labor shortages and other factors.

The manager of Sogo Yokohama said the store also took employees’ working arrangements into consideration and gave them New Year’s Day off.

The manager added that while people continue to be careful about spending, they also want to treat themselves during the New Year holidays. He said the store has prepared a range of products to meet these different shopping needs.

Property data is pointing towards an increasingly expensive housing market across Queensland in 2026, even as price growth moderates in the big southern capitals.

Cotality Research Director Tim Lawless said it was a great time for property owners, but becoming more difficult for those who were trying to get into the market.

“If you own a home, that’s great news. But if you don’t, it’s probably becoming increasingly frustrating, how fast values are rising and how much it costs to get your foot in the door,” Mr Lawless said.

Brisbane’s property values increased by 1.6 per cent in December alone. That equates to an average of almost $16,000 per property — across both houses and units.

By comparison, Sydney and Melbourne were the biggest drag on the headline growth, with values sliding 0.1 per cent lower. The decline in values across Australia’s two largest cities marked the first month-on-month fall since January last year.

“Brisbane has gone from being a market that’s around the middle-to-lower end of the pack for affordability, to one that’s now getting pretty close to one of the most unaffordable markets,” Mr Lawless said.

“And the annual growth rate for Brisbane, at 14.5 per cent, implies the market is up about $131,000 over the year.”

He said the unit sector was rising most rapidly, reflecting more buyers looking at apartments at lower price points than houses.

“We’re also seeing more investment in south-east Queensland and investors do tend to be more active in the apartment sector,” Mr Lawless said.

“As well as the ongoing undersupply, we’re not seeing much building happening across the housing market overall.”

In Greater Brisbane, the 10 biggest increases were recorded in Springwood-Kingston (19.5 per cent), Sunnybank, Nathan, Rocklea-Acacia Ridge, Forest Lake-Oxley, Inner Ipswich, Chermside, Capalaba, Mt Gravatt, and Strathpine (16.1 per cent).

Regional Growth

Regional areas west of the state’s capital were the biggest winners among Queensland’s regional markets, with homes on the Granite Belt now boasting an average value of $592,873 — a 20.4 per cent increase over 12 months.

“Toowoomba, the Granite Belt, the eastern area of the Darling Downs — they’ve all seen housing values rise between 18 and 20 per cent over the past 12 months,” Mr Lawless said.

“Markets like Charters Towers also have seen a really strong rate of growth — up 16 per cent. South of Cairns, Central Highlands — including Emerald — and Maryborough. They’re all in the top 10 growth regions.”

Other suburbs in that regional “top 10” list included Ormeau-Oxenford and Nerang on the Gold Coast, and northern areas of the Bowen Basin.

Mr Lawless pointed to affordability and economic diversity in these areas, as well as access to amenities like schools and healthcare services.

He predicted the market will not see the same level of price growth over 2026, pointing toward possible interest rate hikes in 2026, “which could take a bit of heat out of the market”.

“I think there will be a slowing. But I don’t think we’ll see values going backwards simply because of the low supply in the market and population growth, particularly interstate migration coming into south-east Queensland that remains quite high. That, of course, supports demand,” Mr Lawless said.

“It’s clearly an unsustainable brand of growth we’re seeing across many Queensland markets, not just Brisbane. I think we’re seeing the first signs of that momentum leaving the marketplace. We have seen a few months now where the rate of growth remains very high, but it is slowing down.”

These trends will also affect renters over the coming 12 months.

“It’s going to be a very tight rental market, rents are still going to rise. The past 12 months, we’ve seen Brisbane rents rise about 6.2 per cent — that’s a larger rate of growth than the national average, at 5.2 per cent,” Mr Lawless said. 

He added rents had already risen substantially over the past five years, leading to more group households and multi-generational households forming.

“We’ve got a vacancy rate across Brisbane of 2.1 per cent. It’s a lot lower across the apartment market — 1.4 per cent, only marginally off record lows,” Mr Lawless said.

“House vacancy rates are 2.4 per cent. A normal, health vacancy rate is probably closer to 3.5 per cent.”

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The UK’s financial watchdog has closed 100 investigations without taking enforcement action in less than three years, slashing the number of active probes to the lowest for almost a decade.

The unprecedented cull of legacy cases highlights a strategic change at the Financial Conduct Authority since Therese Chambers and Steve Smart became co-heads of its enforcement arm in April and June 2023 with the aim to focus on fewer but higher impact investigations.

The FCA completed 24 investigations between April and November last year, of which nine were closed with no enforcement outcome and 15 resulted in it taking action, according to data the watchdog provided to the Financial Times.

The watchdog also dropped 91 probes without any enforcement action over the two years to March 2025, taking the total since Chambers and Smart were appointed to 100, the biggest cull since it was created in 2013.

In some of its closed cases, the FCA said it had imposed supervisory measures or action had been taken by a different authority.

“We committed to carrying out fewer, more focused investigations and we are delivering,” said an FCA official. “We continue to take action where we see the most egregious misconduct and are getting outcomes in more of our cases.”

City of London lawyers who represent companies in cases brought by the FCA said the watchdog had become more selective in which investigations it opened, focusing on clear-cut cases where it was more confident of an enforcement outcome.

“This is good news from an efficiency point of view,” said Tracey Dovaston, a partner at law firm Pallas. “Cases no longer appear to be being opened merely for diagnostic purposes, which means less matters are opened and referred to enforcement.”

The biggest fines the FCA imposed last year were for breaching its anti-money laundering rules, including a £44mn penalty for the building society Nationwide and a £39mn fine for Barclays Bank.

The watchdog opened 23 investigations in the year to March 2025 and 25 the previous year, a drop from previous years when it regularly opened more than twice as many. Its stock of active cases almost halved from 230 in 2022 to 124 in October. 

The government has been pushing the FCA and other financial regulators to ease business restrictions to support the UK’s struggling economy. 

In response, the watchdog has tried to speed up its investigations. Last year it announced an outcome in seven investigations within 16 months of launching them, compared with a historical average of 42 months.

However, the FCA has expanded its powers by launching a new regulatory regime for cryptoasset providers that will come into force in 2027.

It has also introduced rules for non-financial misconduct, such as bullying, violence and harassment, that take effect in 2026 and it is due to take on supervision of anti-money laundering in professional services.

Lorraine Johnston, a financial regulation partner at law firm Ashurst, said the watchdog’s expanded remit would not necessarily mean more investigation activity.

“They have been clear that there is still quite a strong enforcement culture,” said Johnston. “But I still think the numbers will come down.”

Officials at the watchdog said its enforcement output — measured by the number of criminal prosecutions, fines, bans, consumer redress payments or public censures it imposes — remained higher than usual, despite the closure of many inconclusive probes. 

In 2024 it announced 41 enforcement actions, and in the 2025 calendar year there were 33, both above its historic annual average of between 20 and 25.

“We are conducting fewer investigations, faster,” Chambers said in a recent speech. “But fewer investigations does not mean fewer outcomes. In fact, we are delivering more.”

“Fewer investigations are ending with no further action,” she said. “Historically less than a third of our enforcement operations ended with an FCA enforcement outcome. Today the majority do.”

One note to start: In this special edition, we’re looking ahead to some of the biggest themes that will affect dealmaking, private equity, corporate finance and much more in the coming months. We’ll be back to our regular scheduled programming on Tuesday January 6. Thanks for reading and happy New Year from Arash, JFK and the whole DD crew.

1. Were First Brands and Tricolor one-offs or signs of blow-ups to come?

Jamie Dimon captured the popular imagination when he described the shock bankruptcies of auto lender Tricolor (for which JPMorgan Chase had securitised most of its debts) and car parts supplier First Brands Group as “cockroaches” in the credit market. For those unaware of the adage, the idea is that when you see one cockroach scuttle out from under the floorboards, there are usually more lurking.

These blow-ups have led to an epic blame game between public and private credit markets.

In the case of First Brands, its $12bn debt pile had a bit of everything: financing from banks, syndicated loans placed with collateralised loan obligations, and opaque off-balance sheet financing largely provided by specialist private credit funds.

Expected losses now stretch into the billions of dollars, with even a typically bombproof debtor-in-possession loan crashing to distressed levels in December.

This is what makes First Brands so unnerving. Until the FT first revealed serious issues with the company’s balance sheet weeks before its bankruptcy, its senior debt was trading close to face value.

Predicting when a credit market will turn is a fool’s errand, but it’s safe to assume that when the finest minds on Wall Street are oblivious to an impending $12bn car crash, there are likely to be more accidents to come.

2. Will OpenAI, SpaceX and Anthropic go public?

After years of false dawns in the US IPO market, investors are hoping 2026 delivers “an epic bonanza” in the form of three of the biggest listings of all time.

Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX and Silicon Valley’s most high-profile artificial intelligence start-ups, OpenAI and Anthropic, are all gearing up for public offerings.

SpaceX is the most advanced, with executives telling investors they plan to go public next year barring major market ructions. Its backers argue that the 23-year-old company has such a dominant position in its field that it could list even in a downturn.

Anthropic and OpenAI have taken steps towards IPOs: the former hired law firm Wilson Sonsini and the latter is in talks with various firms, including Cooley. Both are exposed to market sentiment on AI, which cooled in the last weeks of the year. They are also heavily lossmaking, complicating their paths to the public markets.

SpaceX is valued at $800bn by investors and OpenAI at $500bn, while Anthropic is working on a funding round likely to be priced north of $300bn.

Any of the three would rank among the biggest IPOs of all time — a list topped by Saudi Aramco’s 2019 flotation, which raised $29bn. All three going public would make 2026 a banner year.

“The likelihood of all these companies listing next year is small, but possible, and would mean an epic bonanza for VCs, bankers and deal attorneys,” said Peter Hébert, co-founder of venture firm Lux Capital.

3. Will the megadeal boom continue?

The takeover battle for Warner Bros Discovery was a fitting end to 2025. It minted the biggest announced deal of the year, whether Netflix’s $83bn deal or Paramount’s $108bn hostile bid prevails. 

Some 68 deals worth more than $10bn were announced in 2025, a record high, according to LSEG data. Will this continue? Yes and no.

At first it may accelerate as chief executives dust off the combinations they’ve been wanting to do for years, but that have been held up by boards, financing, antitrust risks and/ or investors. 

Defence and offence will drive them. Look to the oil and gas sector, where oil prices have crashed to a four-year low, for defensive consolidations. On the offensive utilities giants are ready to empire build, cashing in on a share price surge driven by artificial intelligence.

But the boom may be shortlived if an economic downturn or shift of power at the US midterm elections ruins the appetite for riskier deals.

The first half of this year was slow thanks to US President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, but the second half was gangbusters. In 2026, expect the opposite.

As one investment banker put it: 2026 will come “out of the gate like a lion and leave like a lamb”.

4. Will corporate Europe get its act together? 

European companies, spurred on by former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on competitiveness, understand the need for massive investment and cross-border mergers to compete with foreign rivals.

But the barriers are still too high to forge stronger global competitors.

Domestic politics stymied several potential cross-border deals in 2025, particularly in banking — where the region’s industry is losing out to American competitors. And in AI, Europe remains far behind the US and China when it comes to innovation and investment.

In other sensitive sectors, particularly aerospace and defence, European champions are needed but the bureaucratic hurdles are high. For example, in October the groups Airbus, Thales and Leonardo struck a long-awaited deal to combine their space businesses, but they don’t expect the new entity to be operational until 2027.

The backdrop is that Europe’s economy remains anaemic. That helps explain why so much dealmaking in Europe features investment groups searching for undervalued companies to acquire. 

There are causes for hope such as Germany’s approval last year of new chancellor Friedrich Merz’s plan to inject up to €1tn into the nation’s military and infrastructure, the kind of bold spending that will be required to bolster European defence. 

European leaders are well aware that massive investment, decisive strategy and cross-border takeovers are needed to strengthen the region’s industry, which still features some of the world’s leading companies. But Europe’s gap only seems to grow.

5. Will banks start lending again?

At the start of 2025, one topic was top of mind for bankers: deregulation. 

The advent of another Trump presidency had US bank executives hoping that post-2008 crisis rules would finally be scrapped. Meanwhile, European and UK bank executives were worried they’d be left behind.

Deregulation soon arrived in the US. Michelle Bowman, vice-chair for supervision at the US Federal Reserve, has presided over one of the most significant rule rollbacks in decades, with the aim of getting banks to lend more and take on more risk. 

It seems regulators are waking up to the fact that risk hasn’t left the banking system, it has just been rerouted. While the riskier activity that banks used to do has moved into much more lightly regulated areas, such as private equity and private credit, banks are deeply intertwined with those firms through the extensive financing they provide. 

It will be interesting to see how far banks will push their newfound freedoms. The US reforms are expected to free up $2.6tn in lending capacity, mainly by limiting the amount of capital lenders have to hold in case something goes wrong.

Across the pond it’s creating an existential question. Fail to meet the US wave of deregulation and European banks are certain to lose more ground to their rivals. But as the architects of some of the most stringent rules they’ll have to undertake even more sweeping changes if they want a European banking champion.

This year’s predictions:

Take these with a grain of salt. We made only one accurate prediction last year.

Will BP still be a standalone company at the end of 2026?

Yes. Sometimes there’s smoke and fire. Sometimes there’s just smoke. 

Will there be the first pharmaceutical megamerger in years?

Yes. Big Pharma had been busy striking deals with Trump. Now expect them to strike deals with each other. At least one. Maybe two. 

Will a boutique bank crack the 60% comp ratio?

Lazard’s Peter Orszag said this year that he was hoping his firm could soon fall to a number starting with 5. But it’s not looking great at Lazard (or any of its publicly traded competitors) even as deal fees from M&A, restructuring and private capital are soaring. 

Bankers are hot free agents and firms do not want to cede any market share. Revenue-to-pay is closer to 70 per cent across the industry, with bosses not even apologising to their shareholders for the bonus guarantees that they’re passing out like candy.

Will Goldman Sachs buy a private capital giant?

Public and private markets are converging quickly and Trump’s deregulatory efforts have tempted the imaginations of C-suites. Goldman will grow its asset management unit using a signature acquisition.

Will a PE firm blow up?

They say PE firms are hard to kill. But a decade of financial engineering has left many groups leveraged in a myriad of different directions, a recipe for disaster.

Will Jared Kushner win the PE industry’s first Nobel Prize?

We’ll take the over on Kushner’s chances of winning the prize, alongside his father-in-law, and the under on his private equity returns.

Will Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac make their stock market debut?

Yes. Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has been laying the groundwork for months. If he had his way, they would have IPOed months ago. What we don’t know yet is which banks will lead the deal, and reap the fees.

Will Izzy Englander finally step back from his hedge fund Millennium?

Not so fast. We bet he’ll stay on for at least another year.

Will UBS move its headquarters from Switzerland to the US?

No, the place that brought you the Swiss Army Knife is too pragmatic to let its most important financial institution leave.

Will banks start getting aggressive financing buyouts?

Yes. Large money-centre banks have been chomping at the bit to compete with private credit shops. With the Trump administration rescinding so-called leveraged lending guidance, which restricted banks from financing the riskiest buyout loans, they will start taking shots again.

Bankers expect they’ll still be working side-by-side with giants of the private credit industry, but they’re hopeful their risk committees will start to stretch when potentially lucrative financings from the likes of Blackstone, Thoma Bravo and KKR roll in.

Some of our favourite work from the past year: 

The secretive First Brands founder, his $12bn debt and the future of private credit

How Trump is exploiting Big Law’s identity crisis

Inside the downfall of trading titan and Blackpool FC owner Simon Sadler

How Blackstone and its biggest rivals are drifting apart

The hedge fund billionaire aiming to be king of Queens

The billionaire elite who answered Donald Trump’s call on Panama Canal

Inside the collapse of Microsoft-backed UK tech unicorn Builder.ai

‘JPMorgan has crossed a line’: How Altice’s debts ensnared US banking giant

Kirkland & Ellis trains lawyers on communication style after investor tensions

Kushner, Gulf money and desperate texts: inside Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros

Elliott’s ‘lone wolf’: the hedge fund maverick waging war on Big Oil

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Predicting 2026 — Will the Magnificent Seven tech stocks continue to diverge?’

Sonja Hutson
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, January 2nd. I’m Sonja Hutson and this is your FT News Briefing.

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This whole week, we’ve been looking back at 2025 and trying to predict what’ll happen in 2026. It’s our last show in this series, and this time we are talking all about tech stocks.

This time last year, the Magnificent Seven were flying high. These are tech stocks like Amazon and Apple and they basically propped up the entire US market. The question on everyone’s mind was, will their moment in the sun come to an end? FT columnist Gillian Tett had an answer to that in the FT’s Forecasting the world in 2025 list of predictions. She said they’re not gonna fall, but they won’t ride a lot higher either.

What actually happened? Well, it was a bit of a mixed bag. Gillian is here to tell us more and make a prediction for 2026. Hi, Gillian.

Gillian Tett
Hi. Good to talk to you.

Sonja Hutson
Good to have you. So when we say Magnificent Seven, we’re talking about Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. Why did you make that prediction about a year ago?

Gillian Tett
Well, the primary reason I made that prediction last year was because the level of market concentration around the Magnificent Seven — in terms of how much they represent of the overall equity indices — had reached such extreme levels from a historical perspective. That simple historical passion making would suggest that, almost inevitably that was going to reverse.

And on top of that, it seemed to me that there was an awful lot of hype and over excitement about the degree to which some of the tangible fruits of the AI revolution would actually come in to boost these Magnificent Seven’s earnings. Yes, the technology is potentially revolutionary. Yes, it’s probably gonna have a very big impact on the economy going forward, but how quickly it’s actually gonna put some of these companies in the lead forever is not clear to my mind.

Sonja Hutson
Yeah. I think we’re definitely still grappling with a lot of those questions. But let’s run through what actually happened to these stocks. Alphabet did go up more than 60 per cent. Nvidia was up more than 30 per cent, Tesla, up around 20, but then the rest of the Mag 7 was up less than 60 per cent and Amazon was actually only in the single digits.

Why do you think there was this divergence?

Gillian Tett
Well, to a certain extent, the recovery of Alphabet stemmed from the fact that it was seen to be losing the AI race 18 months ago. You had upstarts like OpenAI suddenly seeking to take a lead. And Alphabet has really come roaring back and shown that it does have tremendous amount of research capability.

And even though it hasn’t necessarily deployed all of its innovations as quickly as some of the others. A lot of that’s due to it taking a more cautious, some might say, responsible stance to how it develops its product. So that’s the story of Alphabet. Some of the other ones, well, it’s partly because some of them let ahead earlier on and are now slowing down.

But the really important point of stress is that. I think that although many investors are still very excited about the AI and tech boom, there is the beginning of a much more discerning approach to working out which stocks are going to perform well and which aren’t. Because history shows it’s very unlikely that they’re all going to be winners.

Sonja Hutson
OK, so let’s talk about your predictions for the Mag 7 in 2026. It sounds like, from what you’re saying, that you’re expecting to continue seeing this divergence in fortunes among the Mag 7 stocks

Gillian Tett
2026, it’s gonna be shaped by attention between the fact that on the one hand, AI is a genuinely transformational technology and as a result, the companies which emerge as winners will really emerge as winners in the future.

Just as we saw in the railway mania back 150 years ago that there were some big winners that came out of that; there were also lots and lots of big losers, though and it’s worth stressing that some investors lost a lot of money as a result and I suspect that’ll play out again. But going forward in 2026, you know, we know on the one hand there is this revolution technology. We know, on the other hand, that some American companies are absolutely global leaders and reinforcing their market dominance as we speak. So that should propel stocks higher. However, there are a number of factors that could provide real risks.

Sonja Hutson
What are some of those risks?

Gillian Tett
One is a potential rise in interest rates because, increasingly, the AI Capex is being funded by debt, not just free cash flow or anything else.

Another potential risk is that there could be a political backlash against the AI companies because, although President Trump has been very supportive, in his own policymaking, what you’re starting to see is a national populace like Steve Bannon, increasingly angry with what might be called the “broligarchs”— the elites who are shaping much of this discourse.

But the third and biggest issue in my mind is whether we’re going to see new technologies or new platforms or new approaches to AI emerge in a way that could leapfrog the current framework that the Magnificent Seven are betting on. And by that I mean most of the Magnificent Seven are using proprietary technologies, but we’re seeing in China open source AI approaches.

We are seeing all types of bootlegging approaches that are much cheaper and less energy-guzzling. That’s incredibly important because America is critically short of the energy or need the electricity or need to power these data centres. So any of those factors could potentially create quite a jolt for investors about their assumptions over who’s gonna win or lose.

Sonja Hutson
Is there anything that could get all of the Mag 7 stocks riding high again, like they were in 2024, or are we just kind of past that point and not able to return to it?

Gillian Tett
I think it’s hard to see a synchronised rise in all of the tech stocks going forward because there is so much good news priced in.

However, the thing that would really boost the tech stocks is if it becomes clear that non-tech companies are deploying AI and these new technological breakthroughs in a really meaningful way that’s gonna change the revenues. Because one of the striking things thus far is that, for the most part, we don’t have a lot of evidence of ordinary companies making dramatic productivity and revenue gains on the back of their deployment of tech. Now that may just be a time-lag effect.

The other things that would help would be if there was a sign that America’s getting serious about creating an energy policy that would address the shortfalls of energy around data centres. Above all else, that means getting the transmission lines and the grid sorted out. Not so much just the actual energy generation, but that’s been very hard until now. So if Washington gets serious about forcing a dramatic upgrade in the energy grid capacity, I think again that could make an impact as well.

Sonja Hutson
Gillian, what do you think the change in fortunes of the Mag 7 taught us about tech stocks or just the equities market as a whole?

Gillian Tett
So, one lesson is that, you know, what goes up can sometimes come down — we’ve seen that over and over again in history. Another lesson, though, perhaps, is to go back to the railway mania of the late 19th century and remember that that mania did create railroads — which was an incredible technological breakthrough that we’re all benefiting from today — it made a few people rich, but it also made a lot of people big losers when the railway companies (inaudible) went bust. So bubbles can bring long-term benefits, but they can certainly cause a short term pain. The problem is that no one really knows when they’re gonna pop.

Sonja Hutson
Gillian Tett is a columnist and member of the FT editorial board. Thanks, Gillian.

Gillian Tett
Thank you.

Sonja Hutson
You can read more on 2025 and 2026 predictions when you click the links in our show notes.

This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back next week for the latest business news.

The FT News Briefing was produced this week by Victoria Craig and me, Sonja Hutson. Our show is edited by Marc Filippino. Our show is mixed by Kelly Garry and Kent Militzer. We had help this week from Peter Barber, Michael Lello, David da Silva and Gavin Kallmann. The FT’s acting co-head of audio is Topher Forhecz. And our theme song is by Metaphor Music.

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The S&P/ASX200 was up 19.4 points early Friday afternoon, or 0.22 per cent, at 8,733.7, while the broader All Ordinaries rose 21.6 points, or 0.24 per cent, to 9,040.4.

Nine of the market’s 11 sectors were higher, with materials and technology stocks the only sectors in negative territory.

Uranium producers surge on nuclear news

The energy sector was the day’s strongest performer, rising 0.8 per cent after strong gains among uranium producers.

The move followed news that US-based Duke Energy had filed an initial application to build a new nuclear reactor in North Carolina.

Paladin Energy, Deep Yellow, Boss Energy and Lotus Resources were all up just over five per cent. NexGen Energy gained 2.3 per cent, while Bannerman Energy climbed 3.9 per cent.

Elsewhere in the energy sector, Woodside Energy edged 0.5 per cent higher, while Santos slipped 0.1 per cent.

Biotech stocks extend gains

Health care stocks also moved higher, led by a strong showing among smaller biotechnology companies.

Mesoblast and Telix Pharmaceuticals both rose 2.1 per cent. Racura Oncology jumped 6.6 per cent, Clarity Pharmaceuticals added 7.8 per cent and Orthocell advanced 5.5 per cent.

Goldminers fall after Northern Star update

Goldminers were under pressure after Northern Star released a weaker-than-expected production update, even as gold prices held firm at US$4,375 an ounce.

The company said production had been hit by a series of “isolated negative events”, including a primary crusher failure at its Kalgoorlie processing centre that disrupted output for four weeks.

Northern Star shares dropped 9.5 per cent to a near two-month low of $24.19. Evolution Mining slipped 0.2 per cent and Westgold fell 0.4 per cent.

Big miners and banks post modest gains

In contrast, the major diversified miners were higher. BHP, Fortescue and Rio Tinto all gained 0.5 per cent.

All four major banks also traded higher. 

Australian dollar little changed

The Australian dollar was trading at 66.97 US cents, slightly up from 66.95 US cents at 3.30pm AEDT on Wednesday.