Tokyo, Nov 4 (AP) Asian shares retreated on Tuesday despite the big lift in overseas markets from optimism over AI technology, as traders sold shares to lock in recent profits.
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 dipped 1.7 per cent to 51,497.20 following a national holiday on Monday.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 shed 0.9 per cent to 8,813.70.
South Korea’s Kospi dipped 2.4 per cent to 4,121.74, reversing after a rally took it to record highs in recent days.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng erased earlier gains to fall 0.6 per cent to 25,983.29, while the Shanghai Composite lost 0.4 per cent to 3,960.19.
On Monday, gains for Nvidia, Amazon and other AI superstars propped up share prices. The S&P 500 rose 0.2 per cent and pulled closer to its all-time high set last week, even though the majority of stocks in the index sank. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 226 points, or 0.5 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.5 per cent.
Nvidia was the strongest force lifting the S&P 500, as it has been for much of the year so far. The chip company rose 2.2 per cent to bring its gain for the year to date to 54.1 per cent.
Amazon was the No. 2 force pushing the market higher. It rallied 4 per cent after announcing a USD 38 billion agreement with OpenAI, which will use Amazon’s cloud computing services to run its AI workloads.
IREN, an AI cloud service provider, jumped 11.5 per cent after Microsoft announced a USD 9.7 billion contract with it that will give the tech giant access to some of Nvidia’s chips.
Palantir Technologies, which came into the day with a stunning 165 per cent gain for the year so far, rose another 3.3 per cent. Traders pushed the AI darling higher in the final hours before the data platform company reported its latest quarterly results after trading closed for the day.
Companies across the US stock market will need to hit expectations for growth in profit to justify the big gains in their stock prices since April. Criticism has been rising that the broad US market, and AI stocks in particular, have become too expensive and could be inflating into a dangerous bubble similar to the 2000 dot-com bust.
For the most part, companies have been meeting the high expectations for profits. Four out of every five companies in the S&P 500 have topped analysts’ forecasts so far this reporting season, according to FactSet. With roughly two-thirds of all S&P 500 reports in, companies in the index are on track to deliver healthy growth of nearly 11 per cent versus a year earlier.
On the losing end of Wall Street on Monday was Kimberly-Clark, which dropped 14.6 per cent after it said it would buy Kenvue in a deal valuing it at USD 48.7 billion. Kenvue, which sells Tylenol, Band-Aids and Listerine, jumped 12.3 per cent.
A discouraging report on US manufacturing said that activity shrank more last month than economists expected. Several manufacturers told surveyors for the Institute for Supply Management that President Donald Trump’s tariffs are creating financial pain.
In other dealings early Tuesday, US benchmark crude fell 21 cents to USD 60.84 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, declined 22 cents to USD 64.67 a barrel.
The US dollar slipped to 153.64 Japanese yen from 154.21 yen. The euro cost USD 1.1524, inching down from USD 1.1519. (AP) SKS SKS
Category: Breaking News
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