Auction rates tumble; Virgin demand soars, Apple's big week
Published: June 09, 2025
Auction rates tumble; Virgin demand soars, Apple's big week
News in brief
The number of home auctions held over the weekend fell sharply, which isn’t a surprise given the King’s Birthday holiday. What was unexpected was the dramatic fall in the preliminary clearance rate, down to 63.8pc, with Sydney’s rate tumbling.
Virgin Australia is set to release its initial public offering prospectus this week, and already the carrier’s bankers have told investors that there won’t be enough shares to go around.
It is a big week for Apple, and if the media reports are correct, we will find out about one of the biggest upgrades to the iOS operating system in years, as well as renaming future upgrades, at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
There has been plenty going on in the world of media, arts and entertainment, including Channel Ten dumping its current affairs flagship program, The Project, and a Channel Nine reporter being hit in the leg by a rubber bullet in the LA riots.
A third day of anti-deportation protests in Los Angeles saw clashes between law enforcement and demonstrators, as President Donald Trump and California’s Governor Gavin Newsom traded barbs over who is responsible for the chaos, and for restoring order.
Fear-o-meter
It hasn’t been a gold standard year for investors. For the first five months of the year, the S&P/ASX200 was up 3.4pc. The gold stocks are far and away the big winners followed by the banks, with CBA leading the way, rising 15pc. Another big riser is Telstra.
Turning to property prices. Across the capital cities, they are up 1.7 per cent over the first five months of the year. Of course there’s plenty of disparity underneath that top line number. If you dig into the Cotality numbers, where you really want to be this year, at least in property, is regional South Australia where prices up more than 7pc.
Bonds have been broadly flat for the year. If you bought a 10-year government bond on the final day of 2024, you were getting a yield of 4.37pc. Today you are getting about 4.30pc. Yields move inversely to prices, so those numbers are telling us that bond prices have risen by 1.7pc.
Equities have provided returns in 2025 of about twice that of property, broadly speaking. But it hasn’t been a great year for investors.
Who's talking today?
"You need to think about November 2022, because November 2022 is when ChatGPT became available. Now, machine learning has been around for a lot longer than that. In fact, I made my first investment in an AI company about seven years ago. But it's really that November '22 moment that was transformative. Not since the arrival of the iPhone, and the App Store in 2007, or the arrival of the world wide web in the mid-90s, have we seen something quite as transformative as this. And really it was those Gen AI Large Language Models that really changed the game. But the real innovation is around tokenizing that LLM to solve a business problem with an application... and that's what we're trying to help large and medium sized businesses do here in APAC and across the world."
It’s Tuesday the 10th of June 2025, and equities are outperforming the property and government bond market so far in 2025. No asset class is shooting the lights out though, as global uncertainty weighs on investment returns.
Greed-o-meter
| Prize | Year | # of winners |
|---|---|---|
| $200 million | 2024 | 2 |
| $150 million | 2024 | 1 |
| $150 million | 2019 | 3 |
| $160 million | 2022 | 3 |
| $120 million | 2022 | 2 |
| $110 million | 2019 | 3 |
| $107 million | 2018 | 1 |
Forwarded from a friend? Sign up to our daily newsletter
This week's Powerball has a first-division prize of $100 million. Previous huge jackpots have seen an estimated half of all Australians buy tickets, despite the odds being more than 134 million to one of winning the top prize. And while $100 million sounds enormous, it's dwarfed by the largest prize ever won in the US - $US2.04 billion in California in 2022. Still, not many of us would turn down $100 million, and it's up there with some of the larger Australian jackpots in recent years.
Listen to today's episode 🎧
About last Thursday night...
Thank you to every single person who came along to our special event at Business Sydney. We had a terrific time, launching Michael Thompson's second novel All The Perfect Days.
You can buy All The Perfect Days now at all good bookstores, or online at Booktopia. And if you're part of a book club, and would like Michael to come along (in person or by Zoom) to talk about the book, writing and podcasts, then book in a (free!) session here - he's aiming to talk to 100 Book Clubs In 100 Days.
Of course, the evening kicked off with the first-ever live recording of Fear & Greed's Weekend Edition, complete with plenty of business news, fun and hecklers galore. If you'd like to add a touch of Fear & Greed to your own live event, then we'd love to hear from you.