Oil rises while New Zealand holds its benchmark rate at 2.75%
Asian shares were mostly higher Wednesday after AI stocks drove gains on Wall Street, while U.S. futures edged lower and oil prices rose. In early trading, South Korea’s Kospi was up 5.6% at 5,952.41.
Memory chipmaker SK Hynix jumped 7% to its highest level in two weeks after it reported a record-high operating profit of 83.3 trillion won ($62.8 billion) for the last quarter, up nearly sevenfold from a year earlier and beating market estimates. Samsung Electronics surged 8.5% and is set to report its third-quarter earnings Thursday.
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 rallied 1.3% to 64,094.51, and semiconductor maker Kioxia Holdings climbed 9.6% ahead of its quarterly earnings report on Friday. Taiwan’s Taiex rose 1.8%, and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.4% to 8,889.10. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.7% to 23,041.32, while the Shanghai Composite edged 0.5% higher to 3,666.50.
Amid a busy week for central banks, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand surprised markets by keeping its benchmark interest rate at 2.75%. The S&P/NZX 50 Index edged 0.1% higher.
Treasury yields held relatively steady a day before the Federal Reserve is scheduled to announce its latest decision on interest rates. The Fed last month hiked the fed funds rate for the first time in three years in hopes of slowing inflation, but the widespread expectation on Wall Street is that it will hold rates steady this time. The yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.99% from 5.00% late Monday.
FRED’s raw monthly average effective federal funds rate was 3.75% as of 2026-10-28. FRED’s raw 10-year Treasury yield stood at 5.0% as of the same date, while the market report placed the 10-year yield at 4.99%, down from 5.00% late Monday.
In other dealings early Wednesday, Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose 0.4% to $109.82 a barrel, and U.S. benchmark crude gained 0.5% to $100.37 per barrel. The U.S. dollar rose to 157.99 Japanese yen from 157.91 yen, and the euro fell to $1.1124 from $1.1127.
On Tuesday, the S&P 500 rose 0.6% and pulled within 1.2% of its all-time high set earlier this month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added less than 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.2%. The majority of stocks within the S&P 500 fell, but gains for influential AI stocks made up for that. AI stocks rose to another winning day after weeks of swings, with worries about whether their boom was under threat because it has become so expensive for companies to borrow money to build data centers and buy more AI chips.
Broadcom climbed 4% after announcing a $63 billion financing deal where several Wall Street firms will help Anthropic get access to Broadcom’s XPU AI accelerators and networking solutions. Nvidia added 0.9% and was one of the strongest forces behind Broadcom pushing the S&P 500 higher. CoreWeave, a company that has borrowed money to buy AI chips that it rents out to customers over the cloud, jumped 7.9%.
Companies overall are under pressure to deliver large profit growth. Expectations are high among financial analysts and investors, and that is what allowed companies’ stock prices to run to records recently despite high inflation, high interest rates and other concerns weighing on the market.
Boeing fell 10.7% after reporting a larger loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Confidence among U.S. shoppers has tumbled recently as pressure keeps building on them from high inflation. But a report released Tuesday said U.S. consumer confidence improved in October, when economists expected further weakening.
AP Business Writer Stan Choe contributed to this report.