SYDNEY — Australian shares closed lower Friday, with the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index falling 13.6 points, or 0.15%, to 9,006.5, snapping a two-session winning streak despite a strong overnight lead from Wall Street and a rally in gold prices.

Friday's session had opened on a positive note, with futures pointing to a gain of roughly 22 to 25 points, or about 0.25%, following a robust overnight performance on U.S. markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.18% to 1.2%, the S&P 500 gained around 1.06% to 1.1%, and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.4% overnight, buoyed by Nvidia's confirmed $12.93 billion acquisition of AI platform Hugging Face, its second-largest deal ever, along with a broad rally in software stocks following Snowflake's beat-and-raise quarterly earnings report.

Despite that positive overseas lead, the local market ultimately gave back its early gains to finish the session in negative territory, extending a choppy pattern that has characterized Australian trading throughout the first week of September. Thursday's session, by contrast, had ended firmly higher, with the ASX 200 rising 0.45% to 0.46% to close at 9,020.1, driven by strength across the gold, financials and healthcare sectors.

A significant driver of Friday's softer tone came from a fresh batch of companies trading ex-dividend, a mechanical factor that typically weighs on an index's headline performance regardless of underlying market sentiment. Stocks trading without entitlement to their latest dividend payout Friday included auto retailer Eagers Automotive, fuel retailers Ampol and Viva Energy Group, and broadband........

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