The local share market is likely to follow a very upbeat lead from Wall Street — which is about to close for the day.
Investor sentiment has risen on hopes the US Federal Reserve will go slow on the rate hikes.
Markets are betting the Fed will lift interest rates by just 0.25 percentage points at its next policy meeting on February 1.
Gains in chipmakers boosted the technology sector, which has been hit by recession concerns amid high interest rates (which led to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google sacking thousands of employees in recent weeks).
Qualcomm and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) jumped about 8% each after Barclays upgraded their stocks to “overweight” (from “equal-weight”).
Western Digital jumped 7.1% on a report that the memory chipmaker could merge with Japan’s Kioxia Holdings.
This helped to lift Wall Street’s tech index, the Nasdaq Composite, by 1.8%.
Investors are anxious to hear from corporate executives about their economic outlook in a week in which Microsoft posts results on Tuesday, Tesla and IBM on Wednesday and Intel on Thursday (local time).
“The market’s still quite buoyant at the moment,” said Peter Chatwell, head of global macro strategies trading at Mizuho, who said markets were being driven by the idea that US inflation has peaked.
