NZ sharemarket starts week with another fall

New Zealand sharemarket rallied from Friday's fall but couldn't sustain the momentum long enough to start the week on a positive note, and the benchmark NZX50 index fell a couple of points further.

After losing 12 points on Friday, the NZX50 rose 6.6 points in early trade, but retreated from an intra-day high of 3481 points to finish at 3467.489 points, down just 0.06 percent today, on a volume of 35.4 million shares valued at $105.87m.

Overall, there were 39.2m shares traded, at a value of $108.3m, with 33 rises and 49 falls among the 115 stocks traded.

Among those stocks leading the index down was NZX, whose price fell 2.86 percent, by 7c to 238.

Fletcher Building was up 3c in early trading, but finished the day down 6c at 856, Contact Energy lifted 3c early but finished on par at 575, Freightways added 4c to 342, PGG Wrightson was on par at 50, Air New Zealand edged up 1c to 111.

Pyne Gould Corp was up 3c to 39, but its wanna-be bank, Heartland -- formed from the Marac Finance unit and the Southern Cross and Canterbury building societies -- fell 1c to 73 cents.

Cornerstone stock Telecom crept 2c higher to 240, despite Act leader Don Brash alleging that a future Labour government could rewrite Telecom’s ultrafast broadband (UFB) contract, without paying compensation.

Among shares falling early today, Mainfreight lost 9c on low volume to 1001, and Restaurant Brands was down 2c to 253.

Australian stocks suffered another reversal today as morning gains evaporated to send the market to a fresh nine-and-a-half-month low, with doubts about the economy adding to worries about a Greek debt default.

At the close, the benchmark S&P

ASX200 index was down 33.2 points, or 0.7 percent, at 4451.7, after this morning rising as high as 4520.6. The broader All Ordinaries index fell 38.6 points, or 0.8 percent, to 4512.5.

All sectors were in the red, with energy shares slumping 2.1 percent, led down by Caltex after it issued a profit warning, materials down 1.4 per cent and financials slipping 0.2 percent.

In the United States, the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose on Friday (local time) after France and Germany outlined an agreement to aid debt-burdened Greece.

Research In Motion US-listed shares sank 21.5 percent in its busiest day of trading in almost six years. The BlackBerry maker's sour results pushed the Nasdaq lower and dragged on other top technology names such as Apple Inc, down 1.5 percent.

The Dow Jones average rose 0.4 percent to end at 12,004.36, and the S&P 500 index gained 0.3 percent to 1271.50, while the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 0.3 percent to 2616.48.

Both the Dow and the S&P 500 finished the week with gains and broke a six-week string of losses: The Dow was up 0.4 percent for the week, while the S&P 500 was up just 0.04 percent. The Nasdaq lost 1 percent for the week.