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Despite last week closing with European and U.S. indices mainly up after the U.S. banks posted largely positive earnings as Wall Street opened on Friday, Asian indices are largely down on Monday with Japan’s Nikkei 225 sliding 1%. The Hang Seng sustained a similar loss in Hong Kong with Singapore’s STI heading towards the end of the session with a half percent loss. Australia’s ASX 200 did, however, buck the trend with its heavy weighting towards mining and banking stocks, which performed well, helping the index begin the week on a positive note.
A strengthened yen was the main drag on the Nikkei 225 today, though nervousness that the UK will announce plans for a ‘hard Brexit’ approach when Prime Minister Theresa May speaks tomorrow also contributed to subdued sentiment. Metals and mining companies showed strong gains earlier last week as steel prices rose on expectations that Chinese output is set to decline with a crackdown on illegal production facilities in the country and base metals prices also increased on Chinese demand. However, the market obviously feels some of those gains were overly generous and today’s biggest faller on the Nikkei was Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corp., which finished 4.14% down. Pacific Metals showed the third largest loss, down 2.76%. The second heaviest faller was textiles and materials manufacturer Unitika Ltd., which suffered from a stronger yen to lose 3.53%.
The big automobile manufacturers were largely down with Nissan suffering a 0.6% slide and Toyota 0.76%. Honda closed the session flat with an incremental 0.03% loss. Toshiba had a heavy 2.19% slide while in the oil and gas industry bellwether Inpex lost 1.65%.
While Monday didn’t have any major gainers, Ube Industries rose 1.14%, the session’s best performance, semiconductor company Sumco Corp. 0.85% and industrial engineers Chiyoda 0.73%.
