Oil prices edge lower, while Asian shares rise, tracking Wall Street gains
HONG KONG (AP) — Oil prices slipped Thursday after recent gains, with Brent crude trading near $95 a barrel, while Asian shares mostly advanced.
U.S. futures edged higher.
Renewed fighting between the U.S. and Iran pushed oil prices sharply higher earlier in the week. But U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he doesn’t expect the U.S. bombing campaign to last “much longer.”
Brent crude, the international standard, fell 1% to $94.69 per barrel. Benchmark U.S. crude shed 0.9% to $90.18 a barrel.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.2% to 64,214.48. Among major gainers, OpenAI investor SoftBank Group rose 1.6%, memory chipmaker Kioxia Holdings rose 1.3%, and chip equipment manufacturer Tokyo Electron gained 0.4%.
South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.3% to 6,579.48. Samsung Electronics dipped 0.2%, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix was down 1.1%.
In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng edged 0.6% lower, to 25,167.96. The Shanghai Composite index climbed less than 0.1% to 3,942.09.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.5% to 9,020.10.
The Taiex in Taiwan fell 0.7%, while India’s Sensex was up less than 0.1%.
The regional advance followed gains for stocks on Wall Street, where the benchmark S&P 500 gained 0.5% on Wednesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.6%, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite rose 0.5%.
Investors welcomed some encouraging signals about demand for artificial intelligence from two big tech companies, Dell and Palo Alto Networks. The AI boom has been the key driver behind the S&P 500’s gains this year.
Dell Technologies surged 15.8% following strong quarterly profits. Among some of the biggest names, Nvidia gained 3.2%, Meta Platforms climbed 2.5%, and Micron Technology rose 2.4%.
In the bond market, the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury fell to around 4.77% from more than 4.81% early Wednesday after a global bond sell-off triggered growing concerns over inflation and the Iran war -caused energy shocks as well as rising U.S. government debt.
The U.S. is set to release an employment report for August on Friday.
In other dealings early Thursday, the Japanese yen strengthened sharply against the U.S. dollar, with the dollar trading at 156.67 yen early Thursday, down 1.3% from 158.71 yen late Wednesday. The dollar had surged to above 160 yen earlier in the week, raising expectations that regulators might intervene to prevent the yen from falling further.
The euro was trading at $1.1608, up from $1.1588.
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