Stock market today: Asian stocks mostly higher after Wall Street tech gains
Asia markets are mostly higher following gains on Wall Street driven by Tesla, IBM and Meta Platforms after strong profit reports
HONG KONG — Asia markets are mostly higher on Friday following gains on Wall Street driven by Tesla, IBM and Meta Platforms after strong profit reports.
U.S. futures and oil prices rose.
Japan's core inflation rate, a key indicator of national trends, rose to 2.5% in January, surpassing the central bank’s 2% target and paving the way for further interest rate hikes. Meanwhile, Japan’s unemployment rate for December declined to 2.4% from 2.5% in the previous month.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index edged 0.1% higher to 39,540.37.
The Kospi in South Korea fell 1.4% to 2,501.83 as trading resumed on Friday after the holidays, during which Chinese startup DeepSeek stirred panic in the AI world. Shares of SK Hynix, a major supplier to Nvidia Corp., plummeted by 9.9%. Another tech giant, Samsung, lost 2.4%.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 advanced 0.3% to 8,516.90. In Bangkok, the SET was up 0.1%.
Markets in Hong Kong and Shanghai remain closed for the lunar new year holidays.
On Thursday, the S&P 500 rose 0.5% to 6,071.17, as four out of every five stocks in the index climbed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.4% to 44,882.13, and the Nasdaq composite gained 0.3% to 19,681.75.
Meta Platforms helped push indexes higher by rising 1.6%. The company behind Facebook and Instagram delivered a better profit for the end of 2024 than analysts expected. Perhaps just as importantly for the market, it also talked up its artificial-intelligence efforts and said it will continue to invest in the space.
That calmed some of the worries created by DeepSeek when it said it developed a large language model capable of
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