Stock market today: Asian markets are mostly higher after another winning close on Wall Street

BANGKOK– Asian shares opened mostly higher after US shares rose to records to end their latest winning week. US futures and oil prices also rose.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was an outlier, falling 0.6% to 20,869.39, but the Shanghai Composite gained 0.8% to 3,288.32. The smaller Shenzhen market’s A-share index rose 2.2%.

The gains in Chinese markets followed cuts in the one- and five-year Loan Prime Rates, which are benchmark interest rates for lending. Lower interest rates could help ease pressure on borrowers, especially on property developers who suffered from a crackdown on excessive lending several years ago.

Since the main constraint is weak demand, the “heavy lifting” will have to come from government spending, Zichun Huang of Capital Economics said in a report. China’s finance ministry has pledged to increase such spending in the coming months. “However, we remain skeptical that the fiscal easing will be large enough to achieve anything more than a modest and short-lived rebound in activity.”

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index rose 0.3% to 39,078.33, while Seoul’s Kospi rose 0.8% to 2,614.75. The Australian S&The P/ASX 200 rose 0.7% to 8,340.40.

Oil prices have risen slightly after last week’s fall worries disappeared that Israel will attack Iranian oil facilities as part of its retaliation for Iran’s rocket attack early this month. Iran is a major producer of crude oil, and a strike could boost exports to China and elsewhere. Concerns about the strength of demand from China have also hit oil prices.

Early Monday, U.S. crude rose 38 cents to $69.07 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, the international standard, rose 31 cents to $73.37 a barrel.

The dollar fell to 149.23 Japanese yen from 149.57 yen late Friday. The yen has weakened recently on expectations that Bank of Japan rate hikes could be slower than previously thought.

The euro fell from $1.0867 to $1.0865.

On Friday, Wall Street recorded even more records.

The S&The P500 rose 0.4% to squeak by the highest point of all time At the beginning of this week the price was 5,864.67. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.1% to 43,275.91. another record. The Nasdaq index rose 0.6% to 18,489.55.

Trading on Wall Street remained relatively quiet overall as the S&The P 500 completed its sixth winning week in a row. That is the longest winning streak of 2024.

Solid economic data has fueled the hope that the U.S. economy can generate a perfect escape of the the worst inflation in generationsone that ends without pain recession which many investors had seen as virtually inevitable. And now with the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates To keep the economy going, optimists expect that shares can rise even further.

Netflix helped propel the market with an 11.1% jump after the streaming giant reported stronger earnings than analysts expected for its latest quarter despite a slowdown in subscriber growth.

It helped offset a 5.2% decline CFS healththat said it will likely report a profit for the final quarter that is well below what analysts expected.

Traders are rallying around the idea that the Federal Reserve will cut its key interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point at its next meeting in November. Previously, expectations were high that the Fed would make another half-percentage point cut, but strong updates on the economy have eliminated those expectations. The Federal Funds Rate is currently between 4.75% and 5%.