|
||||||||
  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tokyo stocks find little Christmas cheer
TOKYO, Japan -- Japanese stocks showed little Christmas cheer at the opening on Wednesday, with both the Nikkei and the Topix down slightly. Taiwan, the only other market in Asia that is trading Wednesday, is also lower, with the Taiex down more than half a percent to 4,518.08 Markets in Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore are all closed for the Christmas Day holiday and will resume later this week. Japanese bluechips that had risen in the previous session were hit by a selloff Wednesday after Wall Street fell in a holiday-shortened session on poor retail sales. "There's pretty much nobody home in the foreign brokerages now due to Christmas celebrations, and domestic institutional investors have no particular incentive to trade either," Minoru Tada of World Nichiei Securities told Reuters. The Nikkei 225 average was down 0.24 percent or 20.11 points at 8,490.71 in early trade. The broader Topix slipped 0.27 percent to 827.60. Automaker Toyota Motor fell 1.27 percent to 3,100 yen after gaining almost two percent in the previous session. Nissan is down about 1 percent and Honda is flat. UFJ Holdings, the smallest of Japan's four megabanks, rose 2.54 percent to 121,000 yen on increasing hopes for a solution to mountain of bad loans, then eased to be flat at 118,000 yen. Banks mixedA report in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said UFJ will request Merrill Lynch & Co and other foreign brokerages to provide capital of more than 100 billion yen ($830 million) to boost its financial standing. Other banks were mixed, with Mizuho Holdings and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group lower, but Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group slightly higher. The market's biggest stock, mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo, is down 0.45 percent to 221,000 yen. In a holiday-shortened session on Wall Street Tuesday, the Nasdaq index fell 0.67 percent after disappointing data on durable goods orders and retailers suffering from weak holiday sales. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 0.53 percent to 8,448.11. (Full story) Reuters contributed to this report.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
