Markets Live: What trade war?

"We have never seen business opportunities of the magnitude we are seeing now," said McGauchie.

"We want northern Australia to benefit from Asia's growing prosperity and we want, what will be the Asian century, to be Australian agriculture's century as well."

It was all part of the grand plan to make AACo a premium meat marketer and seller, upgrading its image from that of a corporate country bumpkin selling cows.

On Wednesday AACo's new CEO, former Westpac currency trader Hugh Killen, gave his brutal verdict on the state of the art Livingstone abattoir.

AACo shares plunged after he gave the markets a taste of the full-year results due next month - it includes $65 million worth of impairments, and onerous contract provisions, against Livingstone.

The bad news was not limited to paper losses. The company flagged negative operating cash flows of up to $42 million for the year ending March 31, 2018.

While these are raw numbers, it looks rather ugly for a company which had net debt of $348 million at the end of March.

Killen, who started in February, announced the inevitable operational review "diagnosing the current business model" and identifying the changes that need to be made.

This includes a review of the Livingstone beef operation to "assess all available options and determine the optimal path to deliver shareholder value".

You definitely get the feeling that the schmick new abattoir is not long for this world and the grand new focus on the value-added sale of processed beef, instead of cattle, is not far behind.

Read more.

On the economic agenda:

• February trade balance at 11:30am AEST

Stocks to watch:

• BHP upgraded to buy at Citi
• Perseus upgraded to buy at UBS
• Resmed shares fell in New York trade after a downgrade from Citi on valuation
• Varde, Nomura are said to back $US2.2b Rio Tinto mine deal, AFR says

The company said it removed a feature that let users enter phone numbers or email addresses into Facebook's search tool to find other people. That was being used by malicious actors to scrape public profile information, it said.

"Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way," the company said. "So we have now disabled this feature."

Facebook also said data on as many as 87 million people, most of them in the US, may have been improperly shared with research firm Cambridge Analytica. This is Facebook's first official confirmation of the possible scope of the data leak, which was previously estimated at roughly 50 million.

The now widely followed FANG+ tech index managed to rally 1.6 per cent.

But it was a different story for equity investors, as US stocks were whiplashed as the return of volatility has brought some wild intraday swings.

The Dow dove more than 2 per cent in early trade, with the S&P 500 tumbling 1.5 per cent as the prospect of an all-out trade war spooked investors. However, by the close, the Dow was up 1 per cent, the S&P 500 gained 1.2 per cent and the Nasdaq rebounded 1.5 per cent as cool heads prevailed - for the moment. The Dow traded in a 785-point range on the session.

"The strength of the intra-day reversal is leading some to call a markets bottom," tweeted Allianz's chief economic adviser Mohamed El-Erian.Markets started stablishing after Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump's recently appointed chief economic adviser, moved to calm fears of a trade war, telling Fox Business: "These are just the first proposals [for tariffs] . . . I doubt if there'll be any concrete actions for several months."

Key to the shift in sentiment was a rethink on whether the trade clash between the US and China signalled the initial battles in a pending trade war. Consensus as the trading day progressed moved towards bets that the two nations would work hard to resolve their differences.

"While we continue to maintain our bottom line that both sides would eventually avert a trade war because of the huge stakes involved, risks have clearly risen sharply," Citigroup said.