Aussie sharemarket trades flat after Wall Street sell off, dollar falls by 0.6 per cent

A smaller tech sector exposure and a strong performance from consumer discretionary stocks saw Australia finish marginally in the red, despite a sell off on Wall Street.

Australian shares were surprisingly resilient during Tuesday’s trading despite the mass sell-off overnight on Wall Street, caused by the sudden arrival of Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek.

The benchmark ASX 200 index fell on Tuesday but only by 9.80 points or 0.12 per cent to finish at 8399.10 points. The broader All Ordinaries fell by 15.90 points or 0.18 per cent to 8644.50.

The Aussie dollar fell 0.6 per cent to 62.51 US cents.

The Aussie sharemarket was spared the bloodbath on Wall-Street overnight. Picture: NewsWire / Max Mason-Hubers

Concerns over DeepSeek came to a head on Monday overnight, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite losing more than 3 per cent, while the S & P 500 slid about 1.5 per cent.

The sell-off follows fears American tech is overspending on AI with the US businesses tipped to spend $US500bn ($AU799bn) in AI infrastructure, while Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek was created for just $US6m ($9.59m). Although the validity of the product and the costs are yet to be proven.

Nvidia lost close to $US600bn ($AU959.51bn) in market cap on Monday, the biggest drop for any company on a single day in U.S. history.

Capital.com senior financial market analyst Kyle Rodda said the Australian market was insulated from the Wall Street sell-off due to lacking a tech sector.

“The ASX200 has been relatively well insulated from the sell-off on Wall Street, largely for the same reason it has underperformed US indices in recent years: a lack of large tech companies and artificial intelligence exposure,” he said.

“So we missed out on the way up but we didn’t have the drop today.”

Australia’s energy sector was pummelled, especially the uranium shares with Deep Yellow dived 15 per cent to $1.23, Boss Energy fell 10 per cent to $2.84 and Paladin lost 9.4 per cent to close at $8.15.

“We saw signs of the DeepSeek influence through the uranium plays and some of the real estate sector, especially in data centres,” Mr Rodda said.

“The biggest impact has been on uranium stocks, off the back of fears that the adoption of nuclear energy to power data centres will be delayed and diminished by the impacts of DeepSeek on the AI complex.”

Despite the overall market holding up uranium shares were pummelled. Picture Newswire/ Gaye Gerard.

Overall, on a mixed day for the Australian market five sectors were higher and six traded lower. Consumer cyclicals were the major winners along with communications, health care and financials.

Wesfarmers hit a new record high, up 1.1 per cent on the day to close at $75.46.

Aristocrat Leisure grew 54.21 per cent to $71.85 after Goldman Sachs issued a buy recommendation on the share, while Brevilles is up 1.73 per cent to $38.20 and The Lottery Corp grew 0.41 per cent to $4.94.

The major four banks all outperformed the market. Westpac led the way up 1.15 per cent to $33.40, while ANZ grew 1.13 per cent to $30.15 and NAB lifted 1.07 per cent to $39.82. The only major bank not to rise by more than 1 per cent was CBA which finished in the green up 0.40 per cent to $159.28.

Originally published as Aussie sharemarket trades flat after Wall Street sell off, dollar falls by 0.6 per cent