Market Update – Qantas, Tata Steel

Qantas [QAN.AX] has just announced 40 more North American codeshares with American, WestJet and Alaska Airlines. They’ll have 200 codeshares in total. The glowing safety record of Qantas must be a factor in their success. Although it’s rather narcissistic to think that you might be so ‘lucky’ as to be one of a very elite club of people actually involved in an aircraft disaster, especially when it’s your lifestyle that’s determined your likely cause/s of death and that was down to you.

What an odd dichotomy it is that the same life forms that drive while tired/drunk/not paying proper attention/taking mobile calls/lighting up fags and abuse their bodies without thinking about consequence, think it’s worth taking more seriously a risk which is so remote that it really isn’t worth discussing. We humans really are totally useless.

Looking at the Qantas chart I’d say we’ve got a measured move on here. The congestion area I’ve marked on has been a key price in the stocks history for years. Anyway we’re motoring up to over A$6 at this rate. You can’t buy the shares in London, they’re on the ASX. You can buy Aussie stocks through brokers in the UK if you’re taking a more long-term view and don’t want to use a spread bet as a result.

I saw a meme online the other day, some whingy crap about ‘save our steel industry’. I notice that when the boot’s on the other foot the same people are quick to criticise other nations subsidising their failing, uncompetitive industries, but that’s your average moron for you. It’s not like they’ve been troubled with an original thought or anything, just a desire to follow the herd and fit in in their microcosm of deluded sanctimonious fair weather friends, and they’re just reposting without due diligence or any actual thought what their peer group has stuck out there. Sadly they have a vote too and this is most likely how they use it.

Tata Steel [TTST] is cutting loads of UK jobs. Boo hoo. It’s the real world and if we can’t compete in that arena then there’s no place for nostalgia. The Tata Steel chart is an interesting one. It could be finding support at the recent low. I like that low as well, it’s a candle shaped like a hammer – high open and close and a long tail. A good reversal signal. We now see the price trying to break above the Ichimoku cloud. If it can succeed we could be on for a rally, and in fact if it only goes sideways it breaks out in a week or two. Perhaps that also means commodities are going to come in from the cold, but a rally is not necessarily contingent on that. Just good housekeeping, or the perception of it, could do the trick. Looking to the future is it likely that steel will be replaced by new more versatile man-made materials? Perhaps steel is actually past its best-before date in any case. Probably not that handy in a 3-D printer either. Mittal’s metal without the mettle!