Australian shares edged higher on the back of tech stocks and the supermarkets after New York shook off some mid-session nerves with both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite resetting the closing record highs.

The S&P/ASX 200 Index rose 24.3 points, 0.3 per cent, to 8566.6 in the opening five minutes of trading on Tuesday, with nine out of the 11 sectors in the green.

SGH dropped 4.9 per cent following news that Vik Bansal will step down as chief executive of Boral and transition to a role as non-executive director of SGH.

Insignia Financial jumped 9.4 per cent CC Capital said it continues to “actively work towards making a binding bid for the company” and would finalise financing and investment committee approvals in the next two weeks.

The biggest US banks were higher after passing the Federal Reserve’s annual stress test, setting the stage for payouts. Hewlett Packard Enterprise rose 11 per cent, the most in the S&P 500, after the US Department of Justice settled its lawsuit challenging the firm’s takeover of Juniper Networks.

Oracle reset its record high on a cloud-services deal worth $US30 billion ($45 billion) a year.

In a note, market strategy firm Yardeni Research said so far, the current bull market looks like a normal one, with the potential to match the returns of some of the best bull markets since the mid-1960s.

“We are still targeting 6500 on the S&P 500 stock price index by the end of this year and 10,000 by the end of the ‘Roaring 2020s’ decade. It’s a bit hard to believe, but the main risk at this time may be a stock market melt-up, i.e. a speculative bubble. That’s where we were only four and a half months ago when the latest correction started.”