Australia’s Record-Breaking Rally Stuns Traders, Lifts Markets

Pedestrians are reflected in a window as they walk past an electronic stock board at the ASX Ltd. exchange centre in Sydney, Australia, on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019. We made good progress on our core initiatives across the period, including the program to replace CHESS with distributed ledger technology; upgrade of our secondary data centre to strengthen market resilience; and restructure of our Listings Compliance team to enhance the quality of market oversight, ASX Chief Executive Officer Dominic Stevens said.Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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By Jackie Edwards and Abhishek Vishnoi

March 12, 2020 at 11:39 PM UTC

Updated on

March 13, 2020 at 6:01 AM UTC

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Australian stocks staged a record-breaking intraday rebound in the midst of near universal market gloom, a move that bewildered some traders but nonetheless quickly spread to other riskier assets.

In one of the wildest sessions ever for Australia’s nearly $1 trillion market, the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 Index swung from an 8.1% loss to a 4.4% gain -- the biggest intraday move since the gauge was created in 2000. Everything from S&P 500 Index futures to Indian shares and the Chinese yuan soon followed suit, though in some equity markets the rebound wasn’t enough to lift indexes into the green.