LONDON/SYDNEY – A holiday on Wall Street left shares around the world free to go their own ways on Monday, with Chinese tech names surging and Europe slightly higher, while European long-dated bonds remained under heavy pressure.
Europe’s broad STOXX 600 rose 0.3 percent , helped by healthcare stocks and improved manufacturing data, while there was more excitement in Asia where Chinese tech giant Alibaba’s Hong Kong shares rose 18 percent after it said AI drove a surge in revenue to its cloud business.
US share futures were flat.
The US is likely to be the main focus of the rest of the week, with a raft of data there including surveys of manufacturing and services, and labour numbers culminating in the August payrolls report on Friday.
Median forecasts are for employment to have climbed by 75,000 jobs, though estimates range widely from zero to a 110,000 gain amid uncertainty caused by July’s surprisingly weak report. The jobless rate is seen ticking up to 4.3 percent.
“The jobs market is the number one factor for the Federal Reserve’s policy path. There’s lots of talk from the Fed and from market commentators that labour markets are cooling leading to a rate cut in September, but it’s not a clear-cut situation,” Samy Chaar, chief economist at Lombard Odier, said.
“So it’s a ‘make or break’ week.”
The prospect of lower borrowing costs has kept Wall Street near record highs, and would be timely given September has been the worst performing month of the year for the S&P 500 over the past 35 years.
