Wednesday 06:00 BST. Bourses in Asia-Pacific were mostly positive, taking their lead from gains on Wall Street and better-than-expected Japanese export data.
European stocks are expected to open with gains of about 0.5 per cent as US index futures hold steady.
The Nikkei 225, which lost 2 per cent on Tuesday following the release of sluggish Chinese gross domestic product data, is gaining 2.4 per cent following a healthy rise in exports.
Japan’s exports rose 6.9 per cent in September compared with the same month last year, surpassing economists’ consensus expectations of a 6.5 per cent rise. Exports have proved a weak spot in the world’s third-largest economy, in spite of weakness in the country’s currency. Imports rose 6.2 per cent year-on-year for the month.
“We still have to wait for recovery of demand from the US economy in order to confirm steady recovery of exports,” cautioned analysts at Crédit Agricole.
The Japanese market also benefited from positive news in the US, notably strong earnings from Apple and US home sales data, which helped the S&P 500 to its biggest one-day gain in the past year, closing up 2 per cent at 1,941.
Among big movers, shares in Takata rose as much as 10 per cent following Tuesday’s 23 per cent slide, after the airbag maker sought to reassure investors following the latest in a strong of global car recalls over defective airbags.
Analysts at Nomura argued that Japanese equities should move higher if investors worry less about how the US central bank will act on qualitative easing and instead focus on corporate earnings.
“That being said, we think it may be overly optimistic to expect the sense of alarm about risk aversion around the world to end any time soon. . .a single economic indicator is unlikely to turn opinions round to the positive, either,” they wrote.
Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 1.3 per cent, while the Shanghai Composite added 0.5 per cent. Sydney’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 1.2 per cent after data showed that consumer price inflation in Australia fell to 2.3 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter.
That is lower than the 2.5 per cent benchmark borrowing rate, but Australia’s central bank has already signalled that it does not plan to lower borrowing costs further for fear of stoking a housing bubble.
Brent crude was flat, having risen nearly 1 per cent to $86.30 a barrel on Tuesday. The price was buoyed by Chinese data showing that oil demand – a measure of estimated net imports of oil products and crude that is processed – rose 7.1 per cent in September from the previous year to 10.3m barrels a day.
Gold is down $1 to $1,248 per ounce and the yield on 10-year US government bonds was unchanged at 2.21 per cent, having dipped below 2 per cent in intraday trading last week.
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