Asian stocks mixed after US earnings disappoint

BANGKOK (AP) ? Asian stock markets were mixed Monday in response to disappointing U.S. corporate earnings last week.

The results from Wall Street giants Microsoft, General Electric and McDonald's took traders by surprise and caused U.S. stocks to finish substantially lower on Friday. Investors in Asia saw little reason to go against the flow.

"The U.S. market had a significant drop," said Linus Yip, strategist at First Shanghai Securities in Hong Kong. "A significant drop in the U.S. will have an impact on Asian markets as a whole."

Still, investment sentiment didn't plunge in Asia as it did in the U.S., where investors were unnerved by McDonald's shrinking profits and Microsoft's sagging PC sales.

Japan's Nikkei 225 rose 0.2 percent to 9,021.31, brushing off a widening trade deficit. Exports plummeted 10 percent from a year earlier, hurt by financial and debt problems in Europe, and a surge in anti-Japanese sentiment in China.

In September, a territorial dispute with China over disputed islands in the East China Sea sparked anti-Japanese riots. In the aftermath, exports to China sank 14 percent from a year.

South Korea's Kospi lost 0.3 percent to 1,937.67 and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 dropped 0.6 percent to 4,542.60. Benchmarks in mainland China, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan also fell. Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.2 percent to 21,592.61.

Yip said that "hot money," or short-term speculative inflows, being funneled into Hong Kong are helping to support its stock market. The money is coming from investors who believe that mainland China's slowdown has bottomed out and will start to pick up stream in the final quarter of the year.

Markets may stay subdued ahead of the release later in the week of U.S. data including monthly new home sales, durable goods orders and third-quarter GDP figures, some analysts said. The upcoming U.S. presidential election and developments in the Europe debt crisis also added uncertainty to the mix.

Traders also awaited a slew of corporate earnings from U.S., including Yahoo Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc.

Benchmark oil for November delivery was up 45 cents to $90.50 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $2.05 to end at $90.05 per barrel in New York on Friday.

In currencies, the euro rose to $1.3057 from $1.3023 late Friday in New York. The dollar rose to 79.61 yen from 79.27 yen.

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Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-10-22-World%20Markets/id-f8274238c25e45faaf349d720037e0c8

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