Coming off a long weekend, the ASX closed at a record high once again today. The ASX 200 index advanced 67.2 points or 0.9% to 7379.5 points at the end of the session after pulling back about 19 points from an intraday high set sometime during the session today.
Resmed, Iluka, a2 Milk made the headlines with the best performances among the top 200 stocks by market cap, while Austal, Pointsbet, and Nickel Mines fell. Costa Group shares continued to be subject to sell-offs as shares declined 3.5% today. The blue chips on the whole performed positively today with CommBank, Mineral Resources, and Wesfarmers setting new highs.
Best ASX Stocks for the Week
Zip Co. Limited (ASX: Z1P)
Headquartered in Sydney, Zip Co. is one of the largest BNPL players in Australia. Zip has operations across Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the USA. With Zip’s acquisition of QuadPay, the firm has entered the highly lucrative North American market. In the firm’s latest quarterly report, Zip US (Quadpay) was again a standout, delivering significant growth in what is typically a seasonally quieter trading period, achieving record results across all core metrics –$762.0m in transaction volume (up 234% YoY), $54.4m in revenue (up 188% YoY) with 674k new customers joining the platform (up 153% YoY to 3.8m customers). The group has had a fantastic quarter with revenue up 80%, transaction volume up 114%, and customer numbers going up by 88% to 6.4 million.
With bond yields stabilizing and the majority of the market believing that the inflation numbers reported in the USA is transitory, growth stocks have once again come back in favour. The BNPL industry here in Australia is home to some of the largest in the world. Zip shares have returned close to 6% in the past week and it’s one to keep an eye on as the Z1P shares now trade close to half off its record high we saw in February 2021. Z1P shares closed at $7.28 a share after a 1.82% increase today.
Rio Tinto (ASX: RIO)
In stark contrast to the type of company Z1P is, here we have Rio Tinto, a well diversified global mining powerhouse that is second in global size, behind only BHP. The firm is dual listed on the ASX and London’s LSE. Rio operates across commodities such as Aluminium, Copper & Diamonds, Energy & Minerals, and Iron Ore.
The stock prices of the big 3 miners were being swayed by the sky high iron ore pieces in recent weeks. It’s not just iron ore though, commodity prices across all the commodities that RIO mines have been soaring and the inflation data continues to push it higher. These prices mean that being a producer is the place you want to be in as the cost can be passed over to the customers.
RIO as a result has been driving in the profits from this commodity supercycle that we are a part of. RIO achieved an overall extremely positive first quarter result in 2021 and the company has maintained their guidance across all the commodities it mines. The thick stacks of profits mean that the dividends will once again be extremely high at the end of the year, which is fast approaching.
After some consolidation in the RIO stock price, it looks like it has now stabilized and RIO is definitely one to keep an eye on this week as RIO shares closed at $126.48 today on the back of a positive trading session where shares ticked up 1.23%.
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