Investors rushed back into stocks on Monday lifting the bourse to a one-month high, erasing all the year's losses and adding $31 billion to the combined market capitalisation of the top 200 listed companies. 
Thanks to a strong lead from Wall Street and buoyant commodity prices, the big four banks and miners led a broad-based ASX rally, with only a dozen of the top 200 names trading lower.
The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index and the broader All Ordinaries index each rose 2 per cent, to 5337.1 points and 5417.5 points respectively.
"Relative to cash and bonds, equities are fairly cheap so I think the market has still got room to run," said James Gerrish, senior investment adviser at Shaw & Partners.
"The big movers will be the banks, I think everything is in the price now."
The big four banks lifted by between 2.3 and 3.5 per cent on Monday.
Despite the ebullient mood on show among shareholders, gold and silver prices are hovering around two-year highs, as investors weighed a positive US jobs report against continued global economic risks.
Australia's gold and silver producers were among the best performing stocks among the top 200, including South32, owner and operator of Australia's largest silver mine.
Silver has been carried along by the rush towards safe-haven assets since the Brexit vote, though there aren't too many silver plays on the Australian bourse for investors to buy.
Energy stocks were the only sector in the red.
Oil has been having a tough time of late as the market continues to try and find balance. Stubbornly high US inventories and rising output from OPEC, Russia and Canada have kept a lid on crude prices which have been trading between $US44 and $US52 a barrel in the last month.
There was a broad appetite for shares in the region with Japanese, Chinese and Korean stocks all trading higher.