A woman rides her bicycle with the Marina Bay Sands hotel and high-rise buildings in the background in Singapore on Sept. 4, 2023.
Roslan Rahman | AFP | Getty Images
Asia-Pacific markets struggled to make headway in the early hours of Friday, after mostly falling for the first two trading days of the new year.
Investors will be watching Southeast Asia’s economic data due later in the day, including inflation numbers from Thailand and the Philippines, as well as retail sales data from Singapore.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 started the day on an upbeat note but pared gains to trade around 0.05% higher, after suffering two straight days of losses.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 inched 0.11% higher at open, while the broader Topix added 0.32%.
South Korea’s Kospi dipped 0.08% at open, while the smaller-cap Kosdaq was flat.
In contrast, futures for Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index stood at 16,590, pointing to a weaker open compared with the HSI’s close of 16,645.98.
Overnight in the U.S., the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.56% to mark a fifth straight day of declines — its longest losing streak since October 2022.
The S&P 500 slid 0.34% to mark a four-day losing streak, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was the outlier, eking out a 0.03% gain.
— CNBC’s Sarah Min and Lisa Kailai Han contributed to this report