Asian markets little changed

Asian stocks were mixed on Wednesday after a lackluster session on Wall Street.

Benchmarks logged moderate gains in Hong Kong and Tokyo, but were flat in Sydney and Shanghai. Australian shares declined.

Markets have meandered since last week as investors weighed solid corporate earnings results against renewed worries that troubles with COVID-19 vaccine rollouts and the spread of new variants of coronavirus might delay a recovery from the pandemic.

Traders are also awaiting the outcome of a Federal Reserve policy meeting which wraps up later in the day.

For now, “ranging is a summation of the state of play in the financial markets at the moment,” Jeffrey Halley of Oanda said in a commentary.

The reality that President Joe Biden’s $1.9 billion stimulus package won’t be “rubber stamped” by the U.S. Senate has made investors pull back on risk, he said.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index NIK, +0.31% added 0.2%, while the Hang Seng HSI, 0.08% in Hong Kong gained 0.2%. The Kospi 180721, -0.41% in South Korea was flat, as was the Shanghai Composite index SHCOMP, -0.13%. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 XJO, -0.65% lost 0.8%. Stocks fell in Indonesia JAKIDX, -0.79% but rose in Singapore STI, 0.64% and Taiwan Y9999, +0.27%.

On Tuesday, the S&P 500 SPX, -0.15% lost 0.1% to 3,849.62 but was within 0.2% of the record high it set Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.07% dropped 0.1%, to 30,937.04. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite COMP, -0.07% also slid 0.1%, to 13,626.06.

This is the busiest week so far of quarterly earnings reporting season for U.S. companies.

More than 100 companies in the S&P 500 are scheduled to tell investors this week how they fared during the last three months of 2020. As a whole, analysts expect S&P 500 companies to say their fourth-quarter profit fell 5% from a year earlier. That’s a milder drop than the 9.4% they were forecasting earlier this month, according to FactSet.

Traders are keeping a wary eye on rising coronavirus infections in various countries and a bumpy rollout of vaccinations in the U.S. The spread of variants that are thought to be more easily transmissible and might be less effectively targeted by existing vaccines is adding to alarm.

The fate of Biden’s plan to send $1,400 to most Americans and deliver other support for the economy remains uncertain given the slim majority of the Democrats in the Senate. But on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats are prepared to push ahead with the relief package, even if it means using procedural tools to pass the legislation without Republicans.

The vaccine rollout and hopes for more economic stimulus have been guiding more optimism toward an economic recovery this year, but the picture remains unclear.

“Not all of those things are playing out in a clear way,” said Sylvia Jablonski, chief investment officer of Defiance ETFs. “We don’t know yet how much of the stimulus will come out and when.”

The yield on the 10-year Treasury edged higher to 1.04% from 1.02% late Monday.

In other trading, benchmark U.S. crude oil CLH21, 0.70% rose 22 cents to $52.83 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It gave up 16 cents to $52.77 per barrel on Tuesday. Brent crude BRNH21, 0.68%, the international standard, added 22 cents to $55.85 per barrel.

The U.S. dollar USDJPY, 0.05% was trading at 103.74 Japanese yen, up from 103.62 yen late Tuesday.

source:marketwatch.com