Markets in Asia apart from Shanghai’s were broadly higher Monday, shrugging off the blues on Wall Street after big technology stocks logged their worst week since the COVID crash in 2020.
Oil prices fell while U.S. futures advanced.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng led the region, gaining 1.6% to 16489.08. But the Shanghai Composite index shed 0.5% to 3,050.89 after the People’s Bank of China kept its 1-year and 5-year loan prime rates unchanged.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 added 0.4% to 37,219.47 and the yen weakened further. The U.S. dollar rose to 154.69 yen from 154.59 yen, trading at levels not seen since 1990.
The Kospi in South Korea jumped 0.8% to 2,613.61.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 surged 1% to 7,640.30.
On Friday, the S&P 500 dropped 0.9% to close out its third straight losing week. It ended at 4,967.23, which is 5.5% below its record set late last month.
That’s its longest such streak since September, before it broke into a romp that sent it to a string of records this year.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.6% to 37,986.40, and the Nasdaq composite fell 2% to 15,282.01.
The market’s worst performers included several stocks that had been its biggest stars. Super Micro Computer lost more than a fifth of its value, dropping 23.1%. The company, which sells server and storage systems used in AI and other computing, had soared nearly 227% for the year coming into the day.
Nvidia, another stock that has surged to dizzying heights due to Wall Street’s frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology, also gave up some of its big recent gains. It slumped 10% and was the heaviest single weight on the S&P 500, by far, because of its huge size.
Tech stocks in the S&P 500 broadly lost 7.3% this week for their worst performance since March 2020 as some global giants reported discouraging trends. ASML, a Dutch company that’s a major supplier to the semiconductor industry, reported weaker-than-expected orders for the start of 2024, for example.
The larger threat was a dawning, dispiriting acknowledgement sweeping Wall Street that interest rates may likely stay high for longer.
Top Fed officials said this week that they could hold interest rates at their high level for a while. That’s a letdown for traders after the Fed had signaled earlier that three cuts to interest rates could be possible this year.
High rates hurt prices for all kinds of investments. Some of the hardest hit tend to be those seen as the most expensive and which make investors wait the longest for big…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at ABC News: Business…