The second last day of the year on the Australian stock exchange looks red, with the shortened holiday trading week’s futures down just over 29 points – a 0.35% drop – as the Aussie bourse grinds to a sluggish end to the 2025 season.

The dip at open comes after Wall Street’s holiday struggles; the U.S. markets were dragged down by the Magnificent Seven, most of which suffered sharp declines.

Microsoft was one of the biggest losers, down 1.7%; Nvidia dropped even more, -2.1%.

With the post-Christmas slowdown buying-wise getting into full swing, retail heavyweights like Amazon (down 1.5%) and Best Buy (which dropped around the same) were also impacted – a trend that should now continue.

This marks an unsurprising period of profit-taking after markets (finally) ticked into holiday cheer with a small-ish Santa rally right before Christmas Eve.

Back home, and it feels like a deep breath; Aussie investors don’t have much coming on homefront data but China’s purchasing managers’ index (to be released Tuesday) and the U.S. ISM manufacturing index will affect things here.

Strike Energy (ASX:STX) – the most watched Aussie stock on HotCopper forums through 2024 – will be a mover on Monday after sharing its Walyering East-1 results.

Clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company Dimerix Limited (ASX:DXB) also shared news right before the close of the year, updating shareholders on its DMX-200 Action3 third-phase trials second run in a morning release.

Challenger Gold (ASX:CEL) has also bagged US$7M to refurbish its Casposo plant.

Looking at forex, the Aussie dollar is buying 62.1 US cents.

To commodities, which are in the greenback, ⁠

Iron Ore has dropped heavily, to $98.85 a tonne in Singapore,

Brent Crude is trading at $74.17,

Gold is trading at $2,649 per ounce, and, 

US natgas futures are up 2% at $3.38 per gigajoule.

That’s Market Open, I’m Isaac McIntyre, stick with us for HotCopper’s Market Close.