The Sydney Opera House Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
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Asia-Pacific markets advanced Thursday after Wall Street gained overnight as Fed rate-cut hopes rose and tech stocks rebounded.
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index rose 1.42%, led by tech stocks, while the Topix index added 0.64%. Among the top movers were Advantest, which jumped as much as 5%, tech conglomerate SoftBank, which soared more than 5%, and Tokyo Electron, which was up 2.09%.
South Korea’s Kospi advanced 1.05%, while the small-cap Kosdaq climbed 0.39%. The Bank of Korea kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 2.5% — in line with expectations — for a fourth consecutive policy meeting, amid a weakened local currency and overheated housing market. The Korean won has weakened against the greenback in recent months to its lowest level since April.
Australia’s ASX/S&P 200 rose 0.42%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was up 0.12% at the open, and the mainland CSI 300 was flat.
China’s industrial profits in October plunged 5.5% from a year earlier, government data showed Thursday. Profits for the first 10 months of the year rose 1.9% year on year, compared to the 3.2% rise in the January to September period.
Overnight, the key indexes in the U.S. logged four straight days of gains on rising hopes for a Federal Reserve interest rate cut in December. Investors see an 85% chance of a quarter-percentage-point rate cut in December, up from 30% last week, according to the CME FedWatch tool.
Shares of artificial intelligence player Oracle jumped more than 4% on Wednesday, boosting major averages after Deutsche Bank reaffirmed its bullish stance on the name.
On Wednesday stateside, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 314.67 points, or 0.67%, to finish at 47,427.12. The S&P 500 climbed 0.69% to settle at 6,812.61, while the Nasdaq Composite increased 0.82% to close at 23,214.69.
— CNBC’s Sean Conlon and Pia Singh contributed to this report.
