Asia Pacific stock markets are trading in a muted tone. Gold stands out with a new all-time high. The Japanese Yen is the biggest mover after conflicting remarks from a BoJ official.
Singapore’s STI hits record high, Gold eyes US$3,500 break, Japanese yen weakens
The closure of the US stock market on Monday, 1 September, resulted in a subdued trading session with lower volatility across US equity index futures. In today’s Asia session, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 E-mini futures are trading down marginally by -0.1% and -0.2% respectively, at the time of writing.
We have also just published our monthly tactical view for September on Gold, China H Shares, and Russ 2000 here.
Asia Pacific stock markets are trading in a muted tone as well. Japan’s Nikkei 225 recorded its second day of negative performance with an intraday loss of -0.2%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index dropped by -0.8% after yesterday’s stellar gain of 2.1% in line with weakness seen in China “A” shares, where the CSI 300 shed -1%
The outlier was Singapore’s Straits Times Index, which recorded an intraday gain of 0.4% that hit a fresh intraday all-time high of 4,295 after five weeks of sideways movement.
Gold (XAU/USD) stands out in cross-asset performance today, extending gains for a third consecutive session after last Friday’s breakout above the US$3,435 range resistance, driven by expectations of a potential Fed dovish pivot in September.
Gold (XAU/USD) climbed 0.5% intraday, briefly breaking its 22 April all-time high of US$3,500 with a peak at US$3,509, before easing to US$3,495 at the time of writing. Technical signals continue to support a short-term bullish bias.
In the FX market, the biggest mover so far has been the Japanese yen, which recorded an intraday decline of -0.5% against the US dollar after conflicting remarks from a key Bank of Japan (BoJ) official.
BoJ Deputy Governor Himino mentioned that despite the Boj's three recent interest rate hikes, inflation is still high in Japan, and real rates are low, which suggests he is in favour of higher rates in Japan.
Conversely, he emphasised that the BoJ’s baseline scenario expects underlying inflation to stagnate in the near term but eventually converge toward the 2% target. He added that while Japan’s inflation trend is approaching 2%, it has not yet firmly reached that level.
Key economic releases today that could influence markets include the flash Eurozone core inflation rate and the US ISM Manufacturing PMI for August.
Our YouTube video above contains more insights and the latest intraday technical analysis on our Chart of the Day, Gold (XAU/USD).
