Daily Markets Briefing: STI up 0.84%

Expect cheers in the local market today.

The Straits Times Index (STI) ended 26.16 points or 0.84% higher to 3122.77 on Wednesday, taking the year-to-date performance to +8.40%.

The top active stocks today were JSH USD, which gained 3.49%, CapitaLand, which declined 1.10%, Keppel Corp, which gained 4.11%, Singtel, which gained 0.25% and Global Logistic, with a 0.75% advance.  

OCBC said this came as U.S. stock-market indexes closed at a new round of records as investors welcomed President Donald Trump’s conciliatory tone during his address to a joint session of Congress, despite a lack of details on his economic plans.

Meanwhile, nine out of eleven S&P 500 industries ended higher, with Financials (2.85%) and Energy (2.05%) leading the gains while Utilities (-0.99%) and Real Estate (-0.33%) led the declines.

Here's what this means for Singapore:

The rally on Wall Street overnight could bring some cheer to the local sentiment today, potentially extending STI’s gains in the previous session.

With today’s tone likely to be positive, we could see the STI inching higher in the direction of 3125. Should this obstacle be convincingly taken out, we expect the index to continue its march towards the 3165 subsequent resistance level.

On the downside, we continue to peg the immediate support at 3080, ahead of 3060.

Overall volume tumbled 16.8% with 2.3b units traded, and total value fell 41.9% to S$1.4b, with average value/unit dropping 30.1% to S$0.61.