Asian shares were mixed Monday as volatility in technology stocks persisted, while US equity futures edged higher ahead of another week of American corporate earnings results.
Oil prices fell more than 2% after US President Donald Trump’s decision to waive sweeping sanctions on Russia, including on Russian energy.
A sell-off of technology shares from Asia to Wall Street recently put downward pressure on stock markets, as investor concerns grow over the sustainability of the artificial intelligence boom.
South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index was up 1.8% to 5,768.01 on Monday, after falling sharply last week. The Kospi is down more than 17% over the past month, and still well below the 9,000 mark it crossed in June at its peak on the global AI frenzy.
Samsung Electronics was up 1.2%, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix added 0.4%.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 lost 0.6% to 64,916.70. Japanese chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron fell 2.6%, and OpenAI investor SoftBank Group dropped 2%.
“We’ve been arguing for a while that volatility in tech stocks would pick up as the AI bubble continued to inflate: sharp and short-lived sell-offs were common as the ‘dotcom’ bubble inflated, for example, even as the market ultimately made very large gains on net,” Capital Economics Head of Markets for Asia Pacific Thomas Mathews wrote in a commentary Monday.
Hong Kong’s stock market was closed because of a holiday. The Shanghai Composite index edged 0.4% higher to 3,730.92, after China reported better-than-expected growth of 4.5% for its economy in the July-September quarter.
