By Jay Jackson, Mexico Star
02 Nov 2018, 16:31 GMT+10
SYDNEY, Australia Taking a lead from Wall Street, stock markets in Asia put in a strong showing on Friday, allowing most bourses to close out the week on a positive note.
Renewed confidence in the U.S. and China resolving their issues on trade, and strong earnings results put a floor under share prices.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 roared ahead, gaining 557.59 points or 2.57% to close at 22,245.24.
In China, the Shanghai Composite jumped 58.08 points or 2.23% to 2,664.32 in late afternoon trading.
The Australian Stock Exchange, the ASX rose for the sixth day in a row, finishing the day just a little ahead. The Australian All Ords was up 9.90 points or 0.17% at the close Friday to finish the week at 5,935.80.
In Hong Kong, in late trading on Friday the Hang Seng had soared 906.13 points or 3.57% to 26,322.13.
There was also plenty of action on foreign exchange markets in Asia on Friday too as the Australian dollar surged, buoyed by prospects of a U.S. deal with China.
Its amazing how a few utterances from Donald Trump can add hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, to the capitalisation of stocks around the world, a spokesman for the Big News Network news agency said Friday.
A good move too going into the U.S. midterm elections, with the doom and gloom of the past couple of weeks evaporating.
In late trading in Asia on Friday the British pound was changing hands at 1.3007, having traded as high as 1.3036 earlier in the day, up around 250 basis points in 24 hours.
The euro was in demand at 1.1427.
The Swiss franc rose to 1.00147.
The Canadian dollar was stronger at 1.3073.
The Australian dollar climbed above two major technical hurdles, 0.71 and 0.72 to be trading at 0.7242 in Sydney on Friday, after hitting an earlier high of 0.7252.
The New Zealand dollar followed in the tracks of its Trans-Tasman counterpart, rising to 0.6680.
Only the Japanese yen stayed away from the party, losing ground to 112.98.
Positive third quarter earnings and optimism from U.S. President Donald Trump that a deal on trade could be struck with China, lifted trading on Wall Street overnight.
Trump said he would meet Chinas President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit in Argentina at the end of November.
Maybe theres going to be some hope that a trade deal with China will actually come through, Robert Pavlik, chief investment strategist, senior portfolio manager at SlateStone Wealth LLC in New York was quoted by Reuters Thomson as saying.
By the close of trading Thursday, the Dow Jones industrials had risen 265.05 points or 1.06% to 25,380.81.
The Standard and Poors 500 added 28.6 points or 1.05% to 2,740.34.
The tech-laden Nasdaq Composite did best of all, climbing 128.16 points 1.75% to 7,434.06.
Get a daily dose of Mexico Star news through our daily email, its complimentary and keeps you fully up to date with world and business news as well.
Publish news of your business, community or sports group, personnel appointments, major event and more by submitting a news release to Mexico Star.
More InformationWashington D.C. [USA], Feb 19 (ANI): Sixteen states, including California and New York, in a lawsuit on Monday (local time) ...
Kabul [Afghanistan] Feb 19: US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconcilliation, Zalmay Khalilzad on Monday said that "a unified negotiating team" ...
Ottawa [Canada] Feb 19 (ANI): Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey could be participating in the International Grand Committee (IGC), which is ...
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], Feb 18 (ANI): More than 100 US Department of Defence personnel will support the delegation of 28 ...
The reason is that China has been tacitly protecting China was slow in condemning this latest attack in Kashmir, taking ...
Washington D.C. [USA], Feb 18 (ANI): A new study, conducted by a Rutgers researcher, finds that smoking more than 20 ...
GENEVA, Switzerland - An international humanitarian and medical aid organisation operating in Syria has denounced the shelling of civilian areas ...
CAIRO, Egypt - Just days after foreign ministers from Arab nations sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in ...
LONDON, UK - Seven Labour Party MPs have resigned from the party to form their own group with shared policies, ...
Diehard jihadists have blocked roads out of the last scrap of their Islamic State group "caliphate" in Syria, US-backed forces ...
Sexual violence in South Sudan has been rampant, prompting a call from the UN human rights office, OHCHR, for urgent ...
CO. ARMAGH, Northern Ireland - An explosion at a house in Craigavon, Co. Armagh, in Northern Ireland on Saturday night ...
DUBLIN, Ireland - Following its successful acquisition of Hollywood-based Blindlight, Irish video-gaming company Keywords Studios has now announced its latest accomplishment. Keywords r ...
Read More