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Asian Shares Slip as Investors Greet Oil Deal With Skepticism
Saudi Arabia, Russia agreed Tuesday to freeze output if other major producers followed suitBy CHAO DENG
Updated Feb. 17, 2016 4:10 a.m. ET
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A global rally in shares petered out in Asia Wednesday, with most major stock indexes in the region slipping after an agreement on oil-output restrictions fell flat.
The Nikkei Stock Average fell 1.4%, to 15836.36, following a 7.4% combined rise Monday and Tuesday. The Hang Seng Index fell 1%, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was down 0.6%. South Korea’s Kospi slipped 0.2%.
The Shanghai Composite Index rose 1.1%, however, after pledges from Chinese regulators to support financing for the real economy.
Investors had bought up shares earlier in the week, pushing up sectors like finance that had been battered by worries about the health of banks. But after two days of sharp gains, markets in Asia gave a mixed performance.
“The bounce in sentiment [earlier in the week] is in danger of fading into memory,” Kit Juckes, strategist at Société Générale, said. “The Russian-Saudi agreement to freeze oil output is being treated with a massive dose of skepticism. Those of us who are affected by oil prices but not terribly confident of where they are going in the short term are left reacting to volatile moves.”
Brent crude oil fell 0.5% to $32.04 a barrel, giving up earlier gains in Asia, amid an increasing likelihood that Iran would refuse to freeze its output. Such a move puts in danger a conditional agreement among four major oil producers on Tuesday to halt any increases in production above January levels.
Energy shares fell 4.2% in Australia and 3.2% in Hong Kong.
In Japan, oil explorer Inpex Corp. lost 6.7% to ￥901.7. Oil distributor JX Holdings Inc. fell 4.3% to ￥434.5. Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. dropped 3.3% to ￥1,906.0.
SoftBank Group Corp. rose 5.8% to ￥5,398 on follow-through buying after the firm said late Monday it would buy back up to ￥500 billion (4.4 billion dollars) of shares, its biggest repurchase ever. The shares rose 16% Tuesday.
With Japan’s Nikkei off 17% since the beginning of the year, fund managers’ allocation to the market has fallen to a net 24% overweight from 31% overweight in January, according to a fund managers’ survey from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The survey also showed that global fund managers have the highest cash balances since November 2001, at around 5.6% of their portfolios.
The Chinese market fared better Wednesday, as eight regulatory bodies, including the country’s central bank and the banking and stock-market regulators pledged to support industrial growth through the financial markets. Chinese officials have published a steady flow of comments in recent days to reduce worries of capital flight. Shen Danyang, spokesperson for the Commerce Ministry, said at a news conference Wednesday that there was no basis for concern about a sustained depreciation of the yuan, echoing the view provided by the country’s central banker over the weekend.
In South Korea, the won reached its weakest level against the U.S. dollar since July 2010, on expectations that the Bank of Korea will cut interest rates in the near future. The bank had left interest rates unchanged on Tuesday. The won was last down 0.7% at 1226.33 won to one U.S. dollar.
—Yifan Xie and Kosaku Narioka contributed to this article.
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