ASX 200 rises 0.4% on Thursday 14 January 2021

ASX 200 rises 0.4%

The S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX:XJO) grew by 0.4% on Thursday. Buy now, pay later operators like Afterpay Ltd (ASX:APT) jumped today.

Tristan Harrison

Author Bio Tristan Harrison has a decade of experience as an ASX share investment writer and was previously a business, tax and audit accountant for seven years. Tristan has contributed to The Motley Fool since October 2016. He has an advanced diploma from the Association of Accounting Technicians and is currently enrolled in the Chartered Institute Management Accountant (CIMA) program. Tristan's goal is to help Australians learn about great ASX shares that can help grow their portfolio, wealth and dividends over the long-term. Areas of Expertise ASX dividend shares and passive income strategies ASX growth shares and ETFs Business and company financial analysis Franking credits and personal tax topics Personal finance Education Advanced diploma from the Association of Accounting Technicians Enrolled in the Chartered Institute Management Accountant (CIMA) program Social Media X/Twitter Favorite Investment Quote "Live within your income and save so that you can invest." — Charlie Munger

Published January 14, 2021 8:18 pm AEDT

The S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) went up by 0.4% today to 6,715 points.

Here are some of the highlights from the ASX:

young boys open mouthed in front of shares graph — Image source: Getty Images

Australian Ethical Investment Limited (ASX: AEF)

Australian Ethical announced its quarterly update for the period ending 31 December 2020.

It said that its funds under management (FUM) grew by another 16.9% to $5.05 billion, up from $4.32 billion at 30 September 2020.

It received net inflows of $270 million for the quarter.

The company attributed the increase to strong investment performance and strong net flows.

In the financial year to date to 31 December 2020, FUM has grown by 24.6%.

The Australian Ethical share price went up more than 1% in reaction to this.

Pro Medicus Ltd (ASX: PME)

The Pro Medicus share price went up 15% after revealing that it won a new contract in the US.

The healthcare imaging company announced that it had won a seven-year contract with Intermountain Healthcare worth $40 million.

Intermountain is the largest healthcare provider in the Intermountain West region of Utah, Idaho and Nevada.

Pro Medicus' Visage will replace the legacy PACS and other specialty systems across the 24 hospitals and more than 200 clinics. The contract includes the Visage 7 Viewer and the Visage 7 Open Archive. The Visage 7 platform will be fully deployed in the public cloud, using the Google Cloud Platform.

Planning for the rollout is to begin in the third quarter of FY21, with data migration commencing immediately by Visage's engineering team. The first sites will be scheduled to go-live shortly thereafter.

Pro Medicus CEO Dr Sam Hupert said: "This is a very important deal for us, not only because of its size and scope, it will provide us with a material footprint in Intermountain West, previously an untapped region for us. It also validates our decision to engineer Visage 7 from the ground up to be natively cloud capable, with Intermountain deploying both the Visage 7 Viewer and Visage 7 Open Archive as part of our Visage in the cloud offering, making this one of the largest cloud-based PACS implementations in the world.

"This is our fifth major contract win in six months. We believe this validates our belief that we have unique, market leading technology which, coupled with our expanded product portfolio and native cloud capability, has significantly increased our total addressable market in our key jurisdictions of North America, Europe and Australia."

Bell Financial Group Ltd (ASX: BFG)

The Bell Financial share price went up 3.6% after giving a profit update for FY20.

It said in the year to 31 December 2020 that revenue went up 18% to $299 million, funds under advice (FUA) grew 9% to $63.9 billion, net profit after tax (NPAT) rose 44% to $46.7 million and the earnings per share (EPS) went up 44% to 14.6 cents.

The company will give a full update of its result in February.

Buy now, pay later operators rise

The entire buy now, pay later industry got a boost today after global competitor Affirm jumped after its own initial public offering (IPO).

Australia's biggest player, Afterpay Ltd (ASX: APT), saw its share price grow by almost 10%, the Zip Co Ltd (ASX: Z1P) share price rose by 5%, the Sezzle Inc (ASX: SZL) share price went up 7.5% and the Splitit Ltd (ASX: SPT) share price rose 1.8%.

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