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Yesterday, our local market started the new trading week with an impressive gain of 1.1%, with all eleven industry sectors closing in the green. The energy sector posted the largest gains, up 2.6%, closed followed by the real estate sector and consumer discretionary sectors, which were both up around 2% each.

Looking at the ASX200 leaderboard, one of the best performers was Imugene (ASX:IMU), which lifted nearly 13% yesterday. Also performing well was coal producer New Hope Corporation (ASX:NHC) and real estate investment trust, Ingenia Communities (ASX:INA). Meanwhile, Magellan Financial Group (ASX:MFG) came under pressure, sinking 10% after its co-founder and former Chief Investment Officer, Hamish Douglass had been offloading a significant quantity of his shares in MMG.

The most traded stocks by Bell Direct clients yesterday were the BetaShares Geared Australian Equity Hedge Fund (ASX:GEAR), BHP Group (ASX:BHP) and the Vanguard Australian Shares ETF (ASX:VAS).

Wall Street was closed for the Independence Day holiday but in Europe the DAX fell 0.3% and the FTSE rose 0.9%, and US futures are pointing to declines tonight.

What to watch today:

• The Australian share market is set to open flat, going by the SPI futures.
• Economic news wise, for the third month in a row, the RBA is all but certain to lift interest rates, with the majority of economists believing a 50 basis point increase is locked in, which would take the official cash rate to 1.35%. Stay tuned for this announcement at 2:30pm AEST.
• Moving to commodities, the WTI crude oil price is trading 2% higher at US$110 a barrel, as supply concerns boosted prices despite fears that a recession is looming. Gold is trading flat at US$1,809 an ounce. And the spot iron ore price trades 3.7% lower at US118 a tonne.
• If you hold National Australia Bank (ASX:NAB), Incitec Pivot (ASX:IPL) or CIMIC Group (ASX:CIM), you will receive your dividend payment today.
• Ardent Leisure Group (ASX:ALG), and Clime Capital (ASX:CAM) are set to go ex-dividend today.

Trading Ideas:

• Citi have maintained its Buy rating on Australia’s global shipbuilder, Austal (ASX:ASB) with an increased price target from $2.35 to $2.91. At its current share price of $2.38, this implies 22%. share price growth in a year

Trading Central has a bullish signal on Immutep (ASX:IMM) indicating that the stock price may rise from the close of $0.32 to the range of $0.44 – $0.46 in the next 21 days according to standard principals of technical analysis.