SYDNEY/NEW YORK- Global stocks rose on Wednesday as a flurry of new policies from US President Donald Trump combined with robust corporate earnings to bolster investor optimism, while tariff uncertainty kept the dollar near two-week lows.
Netflix shares surged 14 percent in after-hours trading as the streaming giant added a record number of subscribers last quarter, enabling it to increase prices for most service plans in the United States and other countries.
That helped lift Nasdaq futures 0.7 percent in Asia. S&P 500 futures also rose 0.3 percent. Europe was also set for higher open, with pan-European STOXX 50 futures up0.2 percent.
Late on Tuesday, Trump announced that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle will form a joint venture called Stargate and invest up to $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure. Shares of SoftBank surged 11 percent in Tokyo, while Oracle already gained 7 percent overnight.
Helping risk sentiment is also relief that Trump did not announce a more comprehensive sweep of tariffs at the start of his second presidency. Many investors and foreign capitals had expected tariffs to be among a raft of executive orders Trump signed in his first day in office.
However, he did talk up the threat of tariffs again on Tuesday, vowing to hit the European Union with fresh levies and saying his administration was discussing imposing a 10 percent tariff on goods from China on Feb. 1.
“I think we’re pricing out all the extreme moves,” said Hoe Lon Leng, global head of FX flow and EM rates linear trading at Nomura in Singapore.
“I think Trump seems to be more outcome driven. I think he wants to do a good job and … that means the recent oil prices, the recent move higher in bond yields would have affected his position on pushing things to the extreme.”
Japan’s Nikkei jumped 1.6 percent, tracking broad gains on Wall Street. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan however, fell 0.1 percent as drops in Chinese and Hong Kong stocks offset broad gains elsewhere.