The S&P/ASX 200 is still sitting comfortably higher with a gain of 28 points to 6719 so far today, a rise of 0.4 per cent. But a majority of the market, 129 companies, are trading higher today.

Bellamy's has followed a2 Milk's rise and is 5.6 per cent higher at $9.93 today. Aveo Group is up 4.9 per cent to $2.04, while Technology One is up 3.2 per cent to $7.93.

Meanwhile Domain Holdings is still being hurt by the UBS note, with the stock now down 6.2 per cent to $2.87. Computershare is down 3.3 per cent to $16.

AFIC's sister-fund, the much smaller AMCIL, reported its results today of a 12.3 per cent increase in profits, up to $7 million. The listed investment company is paying a final dividend of 3.5 cents fully franked on top op 3.5 cents worth of interim and special dividends earlier this year. AMCIL shares are up 1.1 per cent to 91 cents today. Like many listed investment companies shares are currently trading below their net tangible asset backing, which is 98 cents per share, down from 102 cents per share in mid-2018.

"After negative returns in the first half of the financial year, the market experienced very strong growth from year lows in December, primarily in response to extremely low interest rates as investors looked for yield and pockets of expected growth," managing director Mark Freeman tells shareholders.

"This produced a market that had a very mixed profile for returns." AMCIL's pick of small, mid, and large companies underperformed the S&P/ASX 200 with a return of 7 per cent compared to the index return of 13.4 per cent. But Mr Freeman reassured shareholders returns over the past ten years are outperforming the index with at 12.5 per cent per annum.

During the year AMCIL added Sydney Airport, Ramsay Health, Wesfarmers, NAB, and Alumina, but disposed od Freedom Foods, Challenger, Clydesdale Bank, and Rio Tinto. It's biggest holdings include CSL, BHP, and Mainfreight.

The nation's depositors have been dealt a fresh blow with the Commonwealth Bank becoming the last of the four major institutions to slash interest rates to virtually nothing on its savings accounts. Financial data firm Canstar confirmed on Tuesday the CBA had halved the rate on its online savings account, taking it down to 0.15 per cent. It follows the decision of the Reserve Bank of Australia earlier this month to cut official interest rates by a quarter percentage point on top of their June reduction.

Across the four major banks, all have now cut the rates on their online flexible savings accounts by at least 0.39 percentage points since the start of the year. NAB has the lowest at 0.11 per cent on its iSaver account while the CBA, ANZ and Westpac are offering 0.15 per cent.

The competition among buy-now-pay-later platforms is intensifying with shares in Splitit rising 13.6 per cent today on top of 9 per cent yesterday, when it added a further 2,000 online merchants in Asia to its portfolio. Shares are currently at 62.5 cents compared to a closing price of 50.5 cents on Friday.

Splitit has signed a three-year deal with GHL ePayments that will make it available to customers in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

This comes a day after Flexigroup announced it has signed up more merchants to its platform, shares were up more than 10 per cent yesterday to $1.83, but have softened today to $1.75. Afterpay is up 2.1 per cent today to $24.17 and Zip Co is up 2 per cent to $3.11.

Shares in Kogan.com are up 4.6 per cent to $5.44 after this morning's update. Retail reporter Dominic Powell has spoken to retail expert and senior lecturer at QUT Business School, Gary Mortimer. He told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald Kogan's line of private-label goods was a key reason the company was able to buck the retail trend.

"He's predominantly selling private label products, which means he's dis-intermediated his supply chains. By removing wholesalers, distributors and retailers from his supply chain, Kogan can take the products from manufacturers and put them directly into shoppers' hands," Mr Mortimer said.

"This means the company gets products into the market at much lower prices than JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman."

Mr Mortimer said the company's extensive line of additional verticals, which is set to expand into credit cards and superannuation, allows the retailer to hedge against a sluggish market.

"Diversifying into complementary businesses means if there's suddenly a downfall in consumer spending, the company can pick up the slack through their credit cards and financing products," Mr Mortimer said. "This has been a long game for Kogan, this isn't some sort of overnight success."

Read the full article here.

Trading is very heavy in Aristocrat Leisure today with 5.6 million shares trading already, much higher than usual. Nearly $306 million worth of shares have traded hands, but the stock price is up only 1.2 percent to $30.085. It did get as high at $30.18 earlier. Block trades of between 1.27 million and 2.5 million shares have been going through since 10.30am.

The stock's average price over the past year is $27. Recently Morgan Stanley's research team piqued interest in the stock by releasing a note comparing it to US gaming darling Zygna.

Mining activity around gold mines is picking up as the price remains at levels high enough to justify the cost of digging it up.

Today Swick Mining Services announced a new three-year contract extension at the Nevada Gold Mine jointly owned by Barrick Gold and Newmont Goldcorp to provide underground core drilling services at Silver Lake Resources' Mount Monger operation. Shares in Swick are up 6.7 per cent to 24 cents today. The new work means Swick will buy 10 new rigs and takes its total contract work in hand up to $353 million.

"It is particularly pleasing that our international strategy is yielding significant results, with a third of our total deployed underground diamond drilling rigs now operating outside of Australia. By the end of September, we will have at least 22 rigs operating in our international operations including the USA, Portugal and Spain - all at major mines with tier one clients," managing director Kent Swick tells the market.

It has also increased its operations at Jundee mine owned by Northern Star Resources. This will see the Jundee mine running 14 full time underground diamond coring rigs.

Shares in a2 milk are trading at $16.67 and did get as high at $16.70 earlier today. The stock has been rising steadily since June and is up 60 per cent since the start of this year. There is no company news out today, but investment firm Kingfish sent out a note to clients saying it had increased its stake and met with a2 Milk distributors in the United States.

"We received additional new support for our a2 Milk thesis as they launched their Smart Nutrition product in the three plus year old segment. The company continues to take market share in China at a rapid clip."

The S&P/ASX200 is up 27.7 points currently to 6719, a rise of 0.4 per cent. Heavyweights like CSL, NAB, Wesfarmers, BHP, Macquarie Group, and Telstra are all higher.

Amcor Plc is down 1.8 per cent to $15.34 and Newcrest Mining is coming down off yesterday's high with a 0.8 per cent decline to $33.63.