Asian Shares Break Losing Streak, Rise After Wall Street Rally

Asian shares rebounded Thursday, buoyed by the previous day’s recovery in U.S. markets that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average surge 4 percent -- its biggest one-day gain in four years. Equity markets in Japan, South Korea and Australia closed higher Thursday, while shares in Shanghai extended their gains made earlier in the day.

The Shanghai Composite Index closed up 5.3 percent at 3,083.59, after crashing 23 percent over the past five sessions. The smaller Shenzhen Composite index was up 0.6 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index also gained 2.5 percent, with most of the region’s shares trading higher.

“From today, I’m no longer pessimistic,” Jiang Chao, a strategist at China’s Haitong Securities, told the Guardian.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Australia’s S&P ASX 200 closed up 1 percent, and South Korea’s Kospi Composite index closed 0.7 percent higher. India’s Sensex, which soared nearly 500 points during the day’s trade, was up 380 points Thursday afternoon.

Markets began tumbling last week over fears that weakness in China’s economy would reverberate across the globe. The stock market rout after China devalued the yuan forced the country’s central bank to initiate a number of measures to reassure investors and increase liquidity, including announcing a reduction in interest rates and slashing banks’ reserve requirement ratio.

“For now the bulls, it seems, have wrestled back control from the bears,” Chris Weston, chief market strategist at the IG Group, told the Wall Street Journal. “We've had our correction, the macro concerns were probably a touch exaggerated and it’s time to expose ourselves to select stocks again.”

Shares are also tipped to open higher across Europe and the U.S. after comments by an official of the U.S. Federal Reserve suggested that an interest rate hike next month was less likely. European index futures are now pointing to a 0.3 percent rise in London and U.S. stock futures are also up 0.4 percent.

"From my perspective, at this moment, the decision to begin the normalization process at the September FOMC meeting seems less compelling to me than it was a few weeks ago," William Dudley, president of the New York Federal Reserve, said, according to CNBC.

Meanwhile, crude oil prices, which fell to their lowest levels since 2009 earlier this week, climbed by around $1 a barrel Thursday after an unexpected drop in U.S. crude inventories, Reuters reported.