Stocks rose across Asia as expected with the strong lead from Wall Street on Friday night translating into solid gains outside Japan, which was closed for a holiday. The Aussie dollar has nearly matched its high of last week while gold held on to its previous gains and weekly high.
The Shanghai Composite is building on its Friday breakout, closing some 0.6% higher to 2959 points while the Hang Seng Index is going even further ahead, up over 1.4% as it launches out above the 27000 points level, having cleared the weekly downtrend line on Friday:
Japanese share markets were closed for yet another holiday with the lack of trading seeing the USDJPY pair stabilising just above the 108 handle following the decent post-NFP bounce on Friday night, but this remains a swing play only:
The ASX200 is finally putting on some gains, despite a trading halt in Westpac after a terrible result that dragged down the other divisions of Megabank, with commodity/material stocks filling in the gaps. The market close only 0.3% higher, not helped by a higher Aussie dollar which has almost matched last week’s extreme high at the 69.20 level:
Both S&P and Eurostoxx futures are up slightly with the S&P500 four hourly chart clearly showing an overshoot on Friday night that could pull back tonight if the lack of solid news on more “talks” with the Chinese:
The economic calendar starts the week relatively slowly with a series of final manufacturing PMI prints in Europe, with a speech from Christine Lagarde to watch later in the session.