Asia slowly shares after Wall Street’s tech-inspired rally By Reuters

By Alun John and Chibuike Oguh

HONG KONG / NEW YORK (Reuters) – Asian equities rose on Tuesday as Sino-American tensions weighed on optimism generated by Wall Street’s technology drive as the dollar fell against almost every major currency.

The Trump administration announced Monday that it will continue to tighten restrictions on China’s Huawei Technologies Co., with the goal of cracking its access to commercially available chips.

MSCI’s broadest index of shares in Asia-Pacific outside Japan gained 0.19%, not to sit far from its pre-pandemic end of January high.

dipped 0.52%, while most markets traded in a narrow band with Chinese blue chips falling 0.25%. The Australian benchmark index rose 0.12%.

E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 were flat.

The Nasdaq climbed to a record high on Monday and the S&P 500 approached its own record level, with both indices raised by technology stocks.

“We saw again some power in tech with semiconductors driving the boat,” said Thomas Hayes, chairman at Great Hill Capital about the U.S. rally.

The US dollar softens against most currencies after disappointing data on production and mortgages, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (OTC 🙂 analyst Joseph Capurso wrote in a note.

But moves were small ahead of Wednesday’s minutes of the Federal Reserve’s release, with speculation that the Fed will adopt an average inflation target, which sought to push inflation above 2% for a while.

hovered close to the 13-month high it hit Monday.

On the commodities front, oil prices were lower on Tuesday, but were still mostly held on overnight gains after OPEC + said the production group almost completely met export cuts.

was down 6 cents, or 0.1%, at $ 45.31 a barrel, after winning 1.3% on Monday. was 0.2% down, at $ 42.81 per barrel, up 2.1% in the previous session

Safe harbor golf close higher to Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE 🙂 also revealed a stake in Toronto-based Barrick Gold (NYSE 🙂 Corp, one of the largest mining companies in the world.

0.4% added to $ 1,995 an ounce.