War end sparks markets; Rinehart’s $1.4bn SpaceX investment; M&A bonanza
Published: June 15, 2026
War end sparks markets; Rinehart’s $1.4bn SpaceX investment; M&A bonanza
News in brief
The ASX 200 hit a two-month high yesterday, jumping 1.25 per cent to finish above 8900 points. It came after Brent crude fell by around five per cent heading towards $US83 a barrel. The Aussie dollar climbed back towards 71 US cents while gold rallied to trade back above $US4300 an ounce.
Billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting has taken a $US1 billion ($1.4 billion) stake in SpaceX following its IPO on Friday.
The share price of Sigma Healthcare, the owner of Chemist Warehouse, jumped more than six per cent yesterday after it backed out of making a takeover attempt for UK pharmacy chain Boots, which is up for sale for around $14 billion.
IFM Investors has upped its offer for toll road group Atlas Arteria by more than seven per cent, valuing the company at $7.4 billion. Atlas’ board had rejected the increased offer.
Where you arrive in a family – oldest, middle youngest child – matters. A new study in the American Economic Review followed 1.2 million Danish children born since 1980 into adulthood, and found that the tiniest organisms in the first years of life have a profound impact on a child’s future. And older children tend to bring home germs that impact younger kids.
Fear-o-meter
Van Eck CEO and MD, Asia-Pacific, Arian Neiron, on SpaceX
Looking across a century and a quarter of visionary companies, from Ford to RCA to Xerox to Intel to Amazon to Google to Tesla to SpaceX, several patterns we think are observable.
First: the market always prices the current product, not the future platform. Ford's investors were pricing transport, but they were inadvertently funding the industrial supply chain. Google's IPO investors were pricing search, but they were inadvertently funding digital advertising, cloud computing and autonomous vehicles.
Second: the discount rate applied to visionary companies is almost always too high. The standard models penalise uncertainty. But in the case of companies with platform potential, uncertainty is not symmetric; the upside tail is longer and fatter than the downside tail, because the downside is bounded by the balance sheet and the upside is bounded by the size of the market being disrupted, or potentially unbounded by a new market.
Third: the investors who win the visionary trade are not those who correctly model the fundamentals. They are those who correctly identify the category they are watching and that it could become infrastructure that will become invisible and indispensable. The investors who analysed Amazon as a bookstore lost. The investors who saw it as logistics and cloud won. Do you see SpaceX as a rocket company or the potential backbone of low-orbit connectivity infrastructure?
Fourth: the visionary premium compresses, eventually. Every company noted above … eventually traded at multiples that reflected earned revenues rather than projected ones. The question for any investor entering a visionary position, we think, should not be whether the valuation is justified by today's fundamentals; it is whether the company will live long enough and execute well enough to grow into its multiple.
Fear & Greed Q+A today
On what a Middle East peace deal means for markets: the winners, the losers, and why investors should still exercise caution:
“You're not making a decision to buy discretionary retailers based on what's going to happen in the next week or two. You're buying them based on what you think is going to happen over the next three, four or five years, or maybe even longer.
The thing to remember is that if you go back to 1970, there's been ten instances where the oil price peaked and then came down rather sharply.
Most people would expect the stock market to climb further, particularly on the back of AI hype and this truce. But in actual fact, when the oil price peaked, it seemed that the economy and the stock market only began to feel the weight of the prior shock from energy prices and its impact on supply chains.
There were ten instances where the oil price peaked from a very steep rise and then fell substantially, and on each occasion, without exception, it coincided with a sell-off in the stock market.”
The framework for a peace agreement between the US and Iran will be signed on Friday in Switzerland, with the Iranian foreign ministry confirming President Donald Trump’s announcement that the war was over.
Tehran immediately portrayed the ending of the conflict as a victory for Iran, while Donald Trump said the deal will bring peace and security to the whole region, something that other presidents before him had failed to do.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese released a statement welcoming the agreement between the US and Iran, saying that continued restraint and constructive engagement will be essential to prevent further escalation and secure a lasting agreement.
The key points in the deal: extend the 8 April ceasefire another 60 days with no hostilities, and lift the US blockade of Iranian ports in return for Iran opening up the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides are committed to further talks. The nuclear issue – the reason Trump said he went to war – hasn’t been resolved yet.
Greed-o-meter
| Program | Network | Total TV National Reach | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2026 FIFA World Cup: AUS v TUR Live | SBS | 4,783,000 |
| 2 | 2026 FIFA World Cup: AUS v TUR Post-Match | SBS | 2,893,000 |
| 3 | 2026 FIFA World Cup: AUS v TUR Pre-Match | SBS | 2,599,000 |
| 4 | Seven News - Sun | Seven | 2,373,000 |
| 5 | 9News Sunday | Nine | 2,230,000 |
| 6 | Farmer Wants a Wife - Sun | Seven | 2,023,000 |
| 7 | 2026 FIFA World Cup: BRA v MAR Live | SBS | 1,846,000 |
| 8 | Shark! | Nine | 1,536,000 |
| 9 | 2026 FIFA World Cup: HAI v SCO Live | SBS | 1,501,000 |
| 10 | Sunday Afternoon NRL Live | Nine | 1,401,000 |
| 11 | 2026 FIFA World Cup: BRA v MAR Post-Match | SBS | 1,239,000 |
| 12 | Seven's AFL: Sunday Afternoon Football | Seven | 1,203,000 |
| 13 | 60 Minutes | Nine | 1,184,000 |
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The FIFA World Cup is already proving to be a ratings winner for SBS, with the Socceroos' match against Turkey easily the most-watched program on Sunday. And just to further make the point - coming in at number 13 on the list is the former Sunday night ratings stalwart, 60 Minutes.
Listen to today's episode 🎧
Source: VOZ by OzTAM, reported in Mumbrella
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