Stock market today: Asian stocks trade mixed after Wall Street rally led by Microsoft gains

TOKYO (AP) — Asian stocks traded mixed Tuesday after a rally on Wall Street led by Microsoft’s gains following news of the hiring of Sam Altman, former CEO of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT .

U.S. futures were up while oil prices were falling.

Chinese markets were initially boosted by a report from financial magazine Caixin that regulators had drawn up a list of property developers who will be able to access low-cost financing. The measures to facilitate more lending come as the real estate sector remains mired in a crisis caused by a crackdown on excessive borrowing and worsened by a widespread economic slowdown.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was little changed, erasing earlier gains, and rose less than 0.1% to 17,783.77, while the Shanghai Composite edged down 0.1% to 3,067.93.

“Hope continues to grow that China’s relentless and growing real estate crisis…will experience a pause, or even a turnaround; in particular, as Beijing steps up its recovery efforts to curb the downward spiral of the broader real estate ecosystem,” Tan Boon Heng of Mizuho Bank said in a commentary.

Tokyo’s benchmark Nikkei 225 edged down 0.1 percent to end at 33,354.14. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.3% to 7,078.20 and South Korea’s Kospi gained 0.8% to 2,510.42.

On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index gained 0.7% to 4,547.38, after experiencing its third consecutive week of gains. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.6% to 33,151.04 and the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.1% to 14,284.53.

Microsoft was the most powerful force pushing the market higher, and it rose 2.1% after announcing it was hiring Sam Altman for a new company following his sudden firing as CEO of OpenAI . Microsoft said it will also continue its partnership with OpenAI because the fervor around the artificial intelligence technology and the enormous profits it is expected to create will impress Wall Street.

Stocks broadly drifted higher throughout the day before taking a turn higher in the afternoon as yields fell in the bond market following a Treasury auction . Falling Treasury yields have led to a sharp rally in stocks in recent weeks.

This week is relatively light on reports that could influence Wall Street hopes that have supported falling Treasury yields.

Investors are confident that inflation is slowing enough that the Federal Reserve can finally put an end to its interest rate hikes that have weighed on the market. Traders are also raising their expectations for when the Fed might actually start cutting interest rates.

Although Fed officials have said they may keep rates high for a while to ensure high inflation is vanquished for good, traders believe the first rate cut could come in early summer or maybe even by March. Rate cuts tend to act like steroids for financial markets and provide oxygen to the entire financial system.

The Thanksgiving holiday means the U.S. government will release its weekly jobless claims update on Wednesday, instead of the usual Thursday. Apart from this, the release of minutes of the latest Fed policy meeting on Tuesday and preliminary reports on US business activity on Friday are among the highlights.

That could make Nvidia’s upcoming earnings report on Tuesday the highest-profile event of the week. Analysts expect its earnings per share to increase more than fivefold from a year earlier and its revenue to rise from less than $6 billion to nearly $16.2 billion.

Nvidia, which rose 2.3% on Monday, wields considerable influence over the S&P 500 and other indexes because it is the fifth most valuable U.S. stock. Much of this increase is due to excitement about AI, and Nvidia’s report could provide clues about the extent to which all the talk about AI translates into actual sales.

Best Buy, Deere, HP and Lowe’s will also release their latest quarterly updates this week.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which is the centerpiece of the bond market, fell to 4.40% from 4.44% late Friday. The two-year yield, which moves more based on expectations for Fed action, slipped to 4.89% from 4.90% late Friday.

In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude fell 61 cents to $77.22 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It added $1.79 on Monday. Brent crude, the international standard, lost 58 cents to $81.74 a barrel.

In currency trading, the U.S. dollar fell to 147.59 Japanese yen from 148.37 yen. The euro costs $1.0960, up from $1.0941.

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AP Business Editor Stan Choe contributed to this report.

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