Asian stock market: On the bids despite downbeat China PMI, trade war hints

Asian traders followed the footsteps of Wall Street, buoyed by the hopes of a cure to the coronavirus (COVID-19) while heading into the European session on Thursday.

In doing so, Asian markets ignored the downbeat performance of China’s April month PMIs, be it official or Caixin, while also paying a little heed to fresh US-China trade war hints by US President Donald Trump.

While portraying the mood, MSCI’s Asia-Pacific index outside Japan surges to the highest since mid-March, up 1.1% now, whereas Japan’s NIKKEI gains 2.70% to 20,315 despite mixed Retail Trade and Industrial Production data.

Further, Chinese equities remain on the front foot with over 1.0% gains by the time of writing whereas those from India seem to benefit from the government’s signals to ease lockdown during early May.

Additionally, shares in Australia benefited from the virus hopes but New Zealand’s NZX 50 drops 1.0% by the time of writing. Furthermore, Indonesia’s IDX Composite and South Korea’s KOSPI were also decorating the gain series while being around 2.60% and 0.70% in green by the press time.

It’s worth mentioning that Wall Street paid a little heed to the US GDP contraction and Fed’s dovish halt during the previous day. Even so, the US 10-year Treasury yields drop 1.3 basis points (bps) to 0.614% as we write.

It’s ECB day for the markets and hence nothing will be paid more attention, except for the US Jobless Claims that are in fashion off-late. While the European Central Bank (ECB) isn’t expected to alter the current monetary policy, the President’s press conference will be the key to watch. Moving on, US Jobless Claims are expected to recover from 4,427K to 3,500K.