Asian Stocks Up, Gains Capped by Continuous U.S. Market Turmoil

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Investing.com – Asian stocks were mostly down on Friday morning, reacting to a fresh U.S. tech stocks rout during the previous session.

The selloff, the third in less than two weeks, contributed to continued volatility in stocks globally, signaling a potential end to a rally that has seen U.S. equity values alone add $7 trillion.

“It does not feel good, but corrections are healthy,” Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) Asset Management head of active equity Ann Miletti told Bloomberg.

“After the increase that we’ve seen in some of the names within tech, it’s not surprising that we’ve got the correction that we’ve seen, and it’s very likely that the volatility is going to continue,” she added.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 5.41% by 10:45 PM ET (2:45 AM GMT) and South Korea’sKOSPI gained 3.82%. Korea saw a slight uptick in the number of daily COVID-19 cases, which stood at 176 cases as of midnight on Thursday.

In Australia, the ASX 200 rose 1.79%.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was up by 2.24%. The government’s further relaxation of social distancing measures, announced earlier in the week, come into effect today. The city’s public services are also expected to fully return from Tuesday.

China’s Shanghai Composite was up 1.71% while the Shenzhen Component was up 2.9%. Tensions between China and the U.S. continue to simmer after U.S. President Donald Trump refused to extend the September 15 deadline for ByteDance Ltd to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations.

But China made advances in its ties with India earlier in the day, with the two countries inking their first formal agreement since June after border clashes took place earlier in the week.

Gains were further capped by Thursday’s data showing 884,000 initial jobless claims in the U.S., casting fresh doubt on the U.S. economic recovery from COVID-19. The number of claims was more than the predicted 846,000 but remained unchanged from the previous week’s number.

The U.S. Senate added to the gloom on the same day, voting down a bill submitted by Republicans for $300 billion in stimulus measures as Democrats sought to increase the number.

“It’s a sort of a dead-end street,” Republican Senator Pat Roberts said following the vote, adding that “along with COVID-19, we have a pandemic of politics” in Congress.

Data from Johns Hopkins University showed that the number of global COVID-19 cases had surpassed 28 million as of September 11.