The Asian trading session today opened on a positive note as there have been no new scares about additional regulation by the Chinese government that can hurt the country’s most successful businesses.
Companies like Alibaba and JD.com are making huge gains today, recuperating the losses they suffered in recent weeks.
In addition, China also announced that it no longer has community-spread Covid-19, which is boosting investors’ hopes that the lockdowns will end soon and economic growth will resume.
Speaking of economic growth, Congress seems a bit split regarding stimulus in the United States. Some Democrats had already shown support for a $550 billion bipartisan bill, while others, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are pushing for a $3.5 trillion bill to be looked at first due to its more far-ranging scope. Split between the two bills, US lawmakers are in a position where they can’t make progress with either of them.
As for the US stock market, indices will reflect the trends seen in the Asian session, but not at such a fast pace of growth. Still, the optimism over China might just be enough to lift all major indices a little bit today.
Part of the reason why we won’t see a major recovery in stocks today is that the United States is struggling with the coronavirus pandemic again. It marked over 111,000 new Covid-19 cases yesterday and is approaching 39 million total infections.
A non-US company to keep an eye on today is Korean tech giant Samsung, which announced over $200 billion of new investment planned for the next three years. Samsung will also reportedly scale up its chip-making division to address the shortages that have plagued the tech industry over the past couple of years.
In terms of fundamental events, today the economic calendar is quite empty. The only major announcement was the final report on GDP growth rate in Germany for the second quarter of this year. That number came in at 9.4% against a forecast of 9.2% YoY, and 1.6% versus 1.5% in quarterly terms. This shows that the German economy is doing slightly better than anticipated.
