Markets
Kospi Rose 4% and SoftBank 15% as Asia's Chip Rally Spread
South Korea's Kospi rose 4% to 5,219.37 early on November 10 and SoftBank jumped 15% before its results. Asian chipmakers followed Wall Street's rebound.
Asia picked up where Wall Street left off. Early on Tuesday, November 10, South Korea's Kospi was up 4% at 5,219.37, Japan's Nikkei 225 up 2.6% at 60,279.37, Taiwan's Taiex up 3.4% and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 up 1.1% at 9,131.70, according to the Associated Press. China lagged, with the Hang Seng and the Shanghai Composite each up about 0.4%.
SoftBank Group was the stock of the morning. Its shares jumped about 15% ahead of quarterly results due later in the day, a day after hitting their lowest level in a year. The company is one of the largest investors in OpenAI, so it trades as a leveraged bet on the value the market puts on AI, and it fell hard during last week's sell-off.
Chipmakers did the rest. Samsung Electronics gained 4.6% and SK Hynix 5.6% in Seoul, while Tokyo Electron rose 5.6% and Advantest 3.4% in Tokyo. Kioxia, the memory maker, was up more than 7% and the Kosdaq nearly 4%, investingLive reported. The gains followed Monday's US session, when AMD rose 13% and Broadcom almost 9% while Nvidia fell on its board's investigation into its chief executive.
The rebound is still repairing damage. On Friday the Nikkei fell nearly 6% on worries that Democratic gains in the US midterm elections could lead to tighter rules on data-centre construction, and two sessions of gains have recouped most of that. Traders in Tokyo were reluctant to push the index above 61,000. "This is not to suggest that the tech sell-off is done and dusted," David Morrison of Trade Nation told CNBC.
Currencies were calm by comparison: the dollar edged up to 158.06 yen and the euro slipped to $1.1222. The day's real test arrives at 8:30 a.m. in New York, when the US publishes October consumer prices without an annual rate. A hot monthly reading would hit the same rate-sensitive tech stocks that have led this two-day bounce, so the morning's gains in Seoul and Tokyo are only as safe as that one number.