It was a big week for S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) stocks.
The week gone by saw the end of the hectic reporting season, revealing some big outperformers alongside a handful of companies that fell short of expectations.
And it saw the RBA hold fire once more on hiking interest rates, leaving the official Aussie cash rate steady at 4.10%.
Not surprisingly then, a lot of ASX 200 stocks made it into The Motley Fool news this week.
Here's why these three grabbed the headlines.
Three ASX 200 stocks grabbing headlines this week
The first big company to grab our headlines this week is S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) mining giant BHP Group Ltd (ASX: BHP).
BHP leapt into the headlines on Monday when the stock closed the day up 2.7%. That was the best one-day performance for the BHP share price since 25 July. This was driven by a resilient iron ore price.
The industrial metal has been defying bearish forecasts, gaining last weekend to trade at US$114 per tonne on Monday. That's up some 10% since 16 August. Iron ore kept climbing higher during the week on hopes of China's stimulus, before retracing to end Friday back at US$114.
BHP also grabbed our headlines when the ASX 200 stock traded ex-dividend on Thursday. Although the miner's dividend was down from FY 2022, it still came out to a healthy $1.25 per share.
This brought the full-year payout to $2.614 per share, for a fully franked trailing yield of 6.1%.
Which brings us to Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA).
The ASX 200 bank stock made headlines on Thursday when the company reported its venture-scaling arm, x15ventures, had entered into an agreement to acquire cloud-based invoice lending platform Waddle from Xero Limited (ASX: XRO).
Commenting on the acquisition, CBA's group executive of business banking, Mike Vacy-Lyle, said:
Through acquiring the Waddle platform, we can continue to provide the best integrated digital working capital solution in the market and support more of our customers with faster funding assessments and approvals.
This is a positive step in helping more Australian businesses to maximise cash flow and drive business growth.
Also grabbing our headlines
The third ASX 200 stock that led our headlines this week was Qantas Airways Ltd (ASX: QAN).
The ASX 200 airline stock has been getting plenty of national media attention over recent weeks. Unfortunately, much of it hasn't been positive.
There've been allegations of tickets sold after already being cancelled by Qantas. And there are indications the government may have kept Qatar Airways from expanding its footprint in Australia to help protect Qantas' business.
These ructions appear to have led to the shock early departure of long-time CEO Alan Joyce, who was in the top role for 15 years.
That early exit, which brought Joyce's planned retirement forward by two months, saw the ASX 200 stock grab our headlines on Tuesday. And it saw incoming CEO Vanessa Hudson take up the reins unexpectedly early the following day.
Acknowledging the difficulties that the airline has faced over the past few weeks, Joyce said:
The best thing I can do under these circumstances is to bring forward my retirement and handover to Vanessa and the new management team now, knowing they will do an excellent job.
