BEIJING (AP) — Asian stock markets posted mixed results Wednesday after Wall Street rose on strong corporate earnings reports.
Tokyo advanced while Shanghai and Hong Kong fell. The yen hovered near a two-decade low near 149 to the dollar. Oil prices rose.
Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 index rose 1.1% on Tuesday after investment bank Goldman Sachs, military contractor Lockheed Martin and others reported strong results.
Market sentiment “looks positive so far amid earnings that beat forecasts,” Anderson Alves of ActivTrades said in a report.
The earnings reports helped offset, at least temporarily, investor concerns that repeated interest rate hikes by central banks in the United States, Europe and Asia to rein in multi-year high inflation decades could push the world economy into a recession.
That concern has helped drag U.S. stocks into a bear market, or a more than 20% drop by the S&P 500 from its January high.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 gained 0.7% to 27,353.87, while the Shanghai Composite Index lost 0.3% to 3,072.85. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.9% to 16,766.79.
Seoul’s Kospi added less than 0.1% to 2,251.88 and Sydney’s S&P-ASX 200 added 0.4% to 6,807.80. New Zealand and Southeast Asian markets advanced.
On Wednesday, the S&P 500 gained 3,719.98 as 90% of shares in the index rose.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.1% to close at 30,523.80. The Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.9% to 10,772.40.
With no major economic data releases expected this week, investors focused on corporate earnings.
Goldman Sachs rose 2.3%, helping to boost other lenders. Lockheed Martin jumped 8.7%, giving other military-related stocks a boost. General Dynamics rose 3.8%, Northrop Grumman gained 6.7% and Raytheon Technologies added 3.4%.
Johnson & Johnson fell 0.3% after reporting strong financial results but with a lowered forecast as it grapples with a strong dollar curbing sales outside the United States.
American Airlines, Union Pacific and American Express also report results this week.
In energy markets, benchmark US crude rose 99 cents to $83.06 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, the base price for international oil trading, rose 66 cents to $90.69 a barrel in London.
The dollar fell to 149.16 yen from 149.21 yen on Tuesday. The euro rose to 98.52 cents from 98.50 cents.
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