Asian shares advance, Japan gains after elections
ADVERTISEMENT Shares in Tokyo — where Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said he would carry on as leader even as the ruling coalition lost its majority in the upper house election — gained 1% as trading resumed after a public holiday Monday. The MSCI regional stock gauge advanced 0.3% after the S&P 500 index closed above 6,300 for the first time.
A cohort of the world's largest asset managers is leaning harder into the rally in risk assets as US stocks push to fresh highs, defying persistent trade and geopolitical tensions. The high-octane wager is that while President Donald Trump is threatening to disrupt the economic order anew, he will step back from the brink.
Traders are now looking for signs of resilience in corporate earnings amid tariff risks.'Earnings season will move into full swing this week, and the guidance will be more important than usual,' said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak. 'This guidance is going to have create a very large increase in earnings estimates if the market is going to reach some of the targets that exist on Wall Street right now.'Investors also kept a close eye on tariff headlines. Trump may issue more unilateral tariff letters before Aug. 1, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. More trade deals may also be reached before the deadline, she added.
ADVERTISEMENT Meanwhile, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will be the latest foreign leader eager to make a deal before the US-imposed Aug. 1 tariff deadline when he visits Trump in the Oval Office later Tuesday.
Market participants are focused on the performance of Japanese markets as investors weigh policy uncertainty after the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's historic loss in Sunday's elections.
ADVERTISEMENT The yen depreciated slightly against the dollar after strengthening as much as 1% Monday following Ishiba's loss.With the election out of the way, 'the possibility of a 'sell Japan' trend, due to worries over extreme fiscal spending, has lessened,' supporting stock prices, said Hideyuki Ishiguro, chief strategist at Nomura Asset Management. However, uncertainty around the new political landscape is likely to cap gains, he said.
ADVERTISEMENT In the US, the second-quarter earnings season is off to a ripping start, with consumer strength powering resilient corporate profits. Yet after hitting a series of all-time highs, the S&P 500 is trading around 22 times expected 12-month profits.'While stocks may be due for a breather, we believe the bull market remains intact,' said Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi at UBS Global Wealth Management. 'We maintain our June 2026 S&P 500 price target of 6,500, and recommend using volatility as an opportunity to phase into markets.'
ADVERTISEMENT The S&P 500 hasn't posted a 1% up or down day since late June, and Mark Hackett at Nationwide notes that volatility gauges also remain 'suspiciously quiet.'
'This calm is unusual and may reflect both investor fatigue and institutional hesitation to fight the current trend,' he said. 'We're in a window where calm can quickly turn to complacency. While a break in either direction is possible, current positioning suggests we'd bet on a rally before a drop.'
(You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
3 minutes ago
- Time of India
Early rains, Pak conflict hit Coke's India biz: CEO
Bottles of Coca-Cola are displayed at a grocery store in Mount Prospect, Ill., Thursday, July 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh) MUMBAI: The onset of early monsoons and the India-Pakistan conflict weighed on beverage giant Coca-Cola's growth in the June quarter in India, one of its key its earnings statement on Tuesday, the US-based company said that consolidated unit case volume declined by 1% as growth in Central Asia, Argentina, and China was more than offset by declines in India, alongside Mexico and Thailand. Unit case factors in the total number of unit cases of beverages sold by the company and its bottling and June, which are typically the peak summer months in India, are crucial for companies with a strong portfolio of summer products such as Coca-Cola, as they account for a bulk of most of their sales. The monsoon hit Kerala on May 24, eight days ahead of its normal arrival date of June 1, the earliest onset since 2009, hitting summer sales."In India, after a strong start to the year, volume declined as our business was impacted by early monsoons and geopolitical conflict early in the important summer season. In response, we are engaging consumers with integrated marketing campaigns," said James Quincey, chairman & CEO at The Coca-Cola Company during a post-earnings analyst call. Quincey said that the India-Pakistan conflict, though brief, added to growth woes, but did not elaborate on the firm's India unit did not respond to impact of the conflict, which lasted a few days in early May, was largely limited to parts of border regions including Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan, and Punjab. Coca-Cola has been ramping up its distribution in smaller towns and rural the scourge of climate change becomes more intense, the company has also been betting on an all-weather strategy. "In India, it is never going to be a straight line and Q2 was not, but we are very bullish on India overall," Quincey said. Coca-Cola will focus on marketing and innovation to gain share in India. The appointment of a new CEO in its local bottling unit, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages, should also bring new energy, dynamism, and focus to the execution, the company said.
Hindustan Times
3 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason' amid renewed 2016 Russia probe attacks
U.S. President Donald Trump accused former President Barack Obama of "treason" on Tuesday, accusing him, without providing evidence, of leading an effort to falsely tie him to Russia and undermine his 2016 presidential campaign. While Trump has frequently attacked Obama (L) by name, the Republican president has not, since returning to office in January, gone this far in pointing the finger at his Democratic predecessor with allegations of criminal action(AFP) A spokesperson for Obama denounced Trump's claims, saying "these bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction." While Trump has frequently attacked Obama by name, the Republican president has not, since returning to office in January, gone this far in pointing the finger at his Democratic predecessor with allegations of criminal action. During remarks in the Oval Office, Trump leaped on comments from his intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, on Friday in which she threatened to refer Obama administration officials to the Justice Department for prosecution over an intelligence assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election. She declassified documents and said the information she was releasing showed a 'treasonous conspiracy' in 2016 by top Obama administration officials to undermine Trump, claims that Democrats called false and politically motivated. "It's there, he's guilty. This was treason," Trump said on Tuesday, though he offered no proof of his claims. "They tried to steal the election, they tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever imagined, even in other countries." An assessment by the U.S. intelligence community published in January 2017 concluded that Russia, using social media disinformation, hacking and Russian bot farms, sought to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign and bolster Trump. The assessment determined that the actual impact was likely limited and showed no evidence that Moscow's efforts actually changed voting outcomes. A 2020 bipartisan report by the Senate intelligence committee had found that Russia used Republican political operative Paul Manafort, the WikiLeaks website and others to try to influence the 2016 election to help Trump's campaign. "Nothing in the document issued last week (by Gabbard) undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes," Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement. Trump under pressure Trump, who has a history of promoting false conspiracy theories, has frequently denounced the assessments as a 'hoax.' In recent days, Trump reposted on his Truth Social account a fake video showing Obama being arrested in handcuffs in the Oval Office. Trump has been seeking to divert attention to other issues after coming under pressure from his conservative base to release more information about Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Backers of conspiracy theories about Epstein have urged Trump, who socialized with the disgraced financier during the 1990s and early 2000s, to release investigative files related to the case. Trump, asked in the Oval Office about Epstein, quickly pivoted into an attack on Obama and Clinton. "The witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama absolutely cold," Trump said. Trump suggested action would be taken against Obama and his former officials, calling the Russia investigation a treasonous act and the former president guilty of "trying to lead a coup." "It's time to start, after what they did to me, and whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama has been caught directly," he said. Democratic Representative Jim Himes responded on X: "This is a lie. And if he's confused, the President should ask @SecRubio, who helped lead the bipartisan Senate investigation that unanimously concluded that there was no evidence of politicization in the intelligence community's behavior around the 2016 election." Former Republican Senator Marco Rubio is now Trump's secretary of state. Since returning to office, Trump has castigated his political opponents whom he claims weaponized the federal government against him and his allies for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters and his handling of classified materials after he left office in 2021. Attacks on predecessors Obama has long been a target of Trump. In 2011 he accused then-President Obama of not being born in the United States, prompting Obama to release a copy of his birth certificate. In recent months, Trump has rarely held back in his rhetorical broadsides against his two Democratic predecessors in a way all but unprecedented in modern times. He launched an investigation after accusing former President Joe Biden and his staff, without evidence, of a "conspiracy" to use an autopen, an automated device that replicates a person's signature, to sign sensitive documents on the president's behalf. Biden has rejected the claim as false and 'ridiculous.' Gabbard's charge that Obama conspired to subvert Trump's 2016 election by manufacturing intelligence on Russia's interference is contradicted by a CIA review ordered by Director John Ratcliffe and published on July 2, a 2018 bipartisan Senate report and declassified documents that Gabbard herself released last week. The documents show that Gabbard conflated two separate U.S. intelligence findings in alleging that Obama and his national security aides changed an assessment that Russia probably was not trying to influence the election through cyber means. One finding was that Russia was not trying to hack U.S. election infrastructure to change vote counts and the second was that Moscow probably was using cyber means to influence the U.S. political environment through information and propaganda operations, including by stealing and leaking data from Democratic Party servers. The January 2017 U.S. intelligence assessment ordered by Obama built on that second finding: that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations to sway the 2016 vote to Trump. The review ordered by Ratcliffe found flaws in the production of that assessment. But it did not contest its conclusion and upheld 'the quality and credibility' of a highly classified CIA report on which the assessment's authors relied. (Reporting By Steve Holland, Matt Spetalnick and Jonathan Landay; Editing by Ross Colvin, Deepa Babington and Cynthia Osterman)
News18
33 minutes ago
- News18
"Totally Out Of Step" Trump Pulls US Out Of UNESCO, Cites DEI Policies, Pro-Palestine & China Tilt
Last Updated: July 23, 2025, 02:00 IST Crux Videos President Donald Trump is pulling the US out of UNESCO, citing anti-America and anti-Israel leanings, as well as UNESCO's woke agenda, as the reasons. Back in February, Trump had ordered a 90-day review of America's presence in UNESCO. He had demanded that special emphasis be put on investigating any 'anti-Semitism or anti-Israel sentiment within the organization.' Following the review, officials reportedly took issue with UNESCO's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, and its pro-Palestinian and pro-China bias. n18oc_world n18oc_crux
