The Philippine stock market and the rest of Asia plunged Tuesday after a record-breaking loss on Wall Street, extending a global rout as panicked investors fret over rising US borrowing costs and take profits after months of market euphoria.
The Philippine Stock Exchange Index fell 65.58 points, or 0.8 percent, to 8,550.42 on a value turnover of P10.4 billion. Losers overwhelmed gainers, 159 to 52, with 44 issues unchanged.
Conglomerate Ayala Corp. lost 2.4 percent to P1,005, while banking unit Bank of the Philippine Islands, declined 3.1 percent to P118.
Aboitiz Equity Ventures Inc., which is into power generation and distribution, banking, flour milling, shipbuilding and property, dropped 4.1 percent to P71.95, but MacroAsia Corp., a company providing aviation-related services, advanced 4.1 percent to P24.25.
Wall Street stocks plunged in chaotic trading on Monday, as the Dow’s gains for 2018 were erased in a brutal pullback from months of stock market euphoria that had been acclaimed by President Donald Trump.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average saw its steepest ever one-day point drop, wiping 4.6 percent off the value of America’s 30 largest companies to finish at 24,345.75, having at one point plummeted nearly 1,600 points to a low of 23,923.88.
Tokyo led a collapse throughout Asia, briefly diving almost seven percent before closing down 4.7 percent. Hong Kong was down more than four percent and Sydney and Singapore each sank three percent.
Seoul lost 1.5 percent, Taipei sank five percent and Shanghai gave up 3.4 percent. Mumbai was 0.9 percent lower, Bangkok plunged 2.4 percent and Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur were also well down.
“How far it goes down? You tell me,” Steven Wieting, global chief investment strategist at Citigroup, told Bloomberg TV. You cannot keep up this speed of decline “day after day after day without finding some sort of bottom rather quickly,” he added, predicting further volatility.
Other assets were also hammered, with a slump in oil prices scything energy firms, while higher-yielding currencies have been hit by a flight to safe havens.
Dealers tracked their colleagues in New York, where the Dow suffered its worst points fall in history and wiped out all its 2018 gains, while the S&P 500 also took a beating to sit down for the year.
Global stocks have enjoyed months of surges fueled by optimism over the US economy, corporate earnings and the global outlook.
The winning streak was fanned by the passage of Donald Trump’s massive tax cuts bill in December, which led several big-name firms to announce pay rises and bonuses.
At the same time the economy continues to improve across the board.
But while traders have been piling into equities, pushing many global indexes to record or multi-year highs, there has been growing concern on trading floors about elevated US Treasury bond yields—at four-year highs—and the likelihood of fresh Federal Reserve interest rate rises. With AFP