Staff writersUpdated June 3, 2026 — 11:05am,first published June 3, 2026 — 5:15amThe Australian sharemarket has made a steady start to the session while oil prices advanced on pessimism over the prospects of the US and Iran reaching a peace deal as fighting flared up again in the Persian Gulf.The S&P/ASX 200 was up 31 points, or 0.4 per cent, to 8755.40 in early trade, with five of 11 industry sectors in positive territory, led by materials and energy.AI-related stocks boosted Wall Street on Tuesday. APMining stocks jumped higher, with BHP up 1.9 per cent, Rio Tinto up 1.6 per cent and Fortescue up 1.2 per cent. Northern Star continued to surge, jumping 7.5 per cent in early trade. It is the second-straight day of strong gains for the gold miner, which soared by 13.6 per cent on Tuesday after activist investor Elliott Management revealed it built a $1 billion-plus stake in the company and urged it to put itself up for sale. Evolution Mining was up 0.6 per cent.Energy stocks advanced as oil rose for a third day. Israel is continuing attacks on Lebanon, jeopardising fragile, long-running negotiations between Washington and Tehran. The delay in a Middle East resolution is raising concerns that the world will need to tap crude inventories further as it waits for Persian Gulf exports to fully resume.“With Middle East production likely not returning to pre-war levels until October-November at the earliest,” global inventories will fall by 800 million barrels, TD Securities commodity analysts including Bart Melek said in a note. “As such, we see Brent crude averaging $US104 a barrel in the second half of the year, with a risk of prices spiking above $US150 due to regional scarcities.”Woodside Energy was up 0.5 per cent and Santos added 0.8 per cent in early trade. Ampol rose 2.6 per cent after the refiner announced it had received approval from the competition watchdog for its acquisition of EG Group Australia, having agreed to sell off 41 of its petrol stations to Metro Petroleum.Financial stocks were mixed, with Commonwealth Bank and ANZ up 0.2 per cent, while Westpac was flat and National Australia Bank shed 0.6 per cent in early trade.Gourmet food company Maggie Beer Holdings shot up more than 14 per cent after revealing a $10 million non-binding offer for its ailing Hampers and Gifts Australia business from a mysterious multinational buyer. It had bought the hamper business in 2021 for $40 million, wanting to rely on it for future growth.“The company confirms that the counterparty’s identity is not information that a reasonable person would expect to have a material effect on the price or value of the entity’s securities,” Maggie Beer Holdings said in a statement.Tech stocks retreated after the surge on Tuesdays, with Xero down 2.8 per cent and WiseTech falling 3.2 per cent. Data centre operator NEXTDC added 0.9 per cent.The Australian dollar was trading at US71.79¢.Overnight on Wall Street, the S&P 500 rose 0.1 per cent after drifting between small gains and losses through the day. The Dow Jones added 228 points, or 0.4 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite edged up by less than 0.1 per cent. All three set all-time highs.The boom in US stocks is being driven by an appetite for profit that’s bigger than investors’ fears about economic disruption and inflation risks, said Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon.“We are definitely in a moment where there’s more greed than there is fear,” Solomon said in an Economic Club of New York appearance on Tuesday. “The capital is available.”Hewlett Packard Enterprise helped lead Wall Street, and its stock soared 19.5 per cent after it reported a profit for the latest quarter that blew past analysts’ expectations. It credited demand from customers building their artificial-intelligence capabilities.Marvell Technology leaped 32.5 per cent for its best day since the stock began trading in 2000 after Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, suggested at a conference in Taiwan that Marvell could be “the next trillion-dollar company.” The last company to enter the expanding club of behemoths was Micron Technology, which is likewise riding the AI wave. Nvidia, which slipped 0.7 per cent, has seen its total value top $US5 trillion ($7 trillion).Souring Bitcoin sentiment has triggered almost $US1.5 billion in crypto liquidations over the past 24 hours, as the largest digital asset sank back to a two-month low.This forced deleveraging — the automatic, mandatory closure of high-risk trades by crypto exchanges — is the largest volume seen since February, according to data compiled by CoinGlass. Almost $US800 million positions in Bitcoin were wiped out.Bitcoin slipped as much as 7 per cent to below $US67,000 for the first time since April as lingering concern about the conflict in Iran and selling by major holder Strategy continued to dent investor appetite. The price of the token is down almost 50 per cent from an all-time high of around $US126,000 reached in October.Analysts have been saying the broad US stock market may be set for a slowdown following an unrelenting streak of nine straight winning weeks for the S&P 500, its longest since 2023. The rally has been largely due to strong profit reports from US companies, as well as hopes that the Trump administration and Iran will reach a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.The yield on the 10-year US Treasury slipped to 4.45 per cent from 4.47 per cent late on Monday.High yields worldwide recently have threatened to slow economies and undercut prices for stocks and all kinds of other investments. They have already forced the average long-term US mortgage rate to its most expensive level in nine months, and they could curtail companies’ borrowing to build the AI data centres that have supported the US economy’s growth recently.In other international markets, indexes rose across much of Europe.With AP, BloombergThe Market Recap newsletter is a wrap of the day’s trading. Get it each weekday afternoon.From our partners