singapore stocks ignore shanghai and wall street and end lower 1525092015

Singapore stocks remained unmoved by a three per cent rally in the Shanghai Composite index yesterday (October 8), with investors choosing instead to lock in some profits after the sharp gains in recent sessions. Singapore’s Straits Times Index opened in positive territory but slipped quickly into the red in the first hour and remained there in sideways trading during the rest of the session.

Indices

The Straits Times Index (STI) ended 14.78 points or 0.5 per cent lower at 2,947.03, taking the year-to-date performance to -12.43 per cent.

The FTSE ST Mid Cap Index declined 0.48 per cent, while the FTSE ST Small Cap Index declined 0.29 per cent.

The Singapore Exchange traded a volume of 1,377.7 million shares valued at SG$1,229.6 million. Losers outnumbered gainers by 245/159.

Amongst the FTSE ST sectors, the only gaining sectors were maritime (+2.30 per cent) and telecommunications (+0.38 per cent). Losing sectors included basic materials (-2.20 per cent), consumer goods (-1.89 per cent), utilities (-1.11 per cent), China (-0.91 per cent), CataList index (-0.89 per cent) and China Top Index (-0.89 per cent).

Stocks

The Chinese unit of DBS Bank [DBS Group Holdings Ltd (SGX:D05)] has been selected as one of the first group of banks to be allowed to test China’s Cross-Border International Payment System (CIPS), a new international payment system aimed at speeding up the transactions for businesses using the Chinese currency, the yuan. Meanwhile, ICBC Singapore [Industrial and Coml Bank of China Ltd (SHA:601398)] said it had already cleared a 35 million yuan (SG$7.75 million) trade settlement payment from Singapore's Raffemet to Baosteel Resources in Shanghai.

Shares in Noble Group Limited (SGX:N21) were unchanged at SG$0.405. In another example of the rapid churn in its senior management, the company announced Thursday that it had hired former oil trader, Wael Amer, as its deputy head, Middle East & North Africa and East Africa effective October 7.

Singapore Telecommunications Limited (SGX:Z74) will invest SG$400 million in a new Tier 3-Plus data centre facility comprising 570,000 square feet to be built in Jurong. The data centre will be the company’s ninth in Singapore and will have "high-grade private and co-location data hosting capabilities" and host technologies such as cloud solutions, smart applications and different platforms for analytics. According to Channel News Asia, the facility is likely to be completed in the third quarter of 2016.

Singapore Post Limited (SGX:S08) said yesterday it had successfully made a trial run of mail delivery through a drone. The delivery, which consisted of a letter and a T-shirt in a packet, took off from Lorong Halus and was destined for Pulau Ubin, the island off Singapore's north-eastern coast. The 2 km test flight took about five minutes, Channel News Asia said. "SingPost’s exploration of the drone technology is a move to provide enhanced end-to-end solutions to facilitate urban logistics as well as tap on the burgeoning eCommerce growth in Asia Pacific," said SingPost.

Oxley Holdings Ltd (SGX:5UX) said Thursday that it was mulling over the listing of its Malaysian property development business on Singapore’s CataList board, in line with its earlier announcement regarding the restructuring of the company’s overseas property development businesses. "In view of the uncertainties surrounding the outlook of the global economic growth and financial markets, the directors are of the view that it is prudent to limit the proposed spin-off to the property development activities of the group within Malaysia only," Oxley said, as reported by the Business Times.

Economic news

According to the latest data released by SRX Property yesterday, prices of Housing and Development Board (HDB) fell a mere 0.4 per cent in September compared to August, though transaction volumes were up 3.9 per cent. On a year-on-year basis, resale prices for HDB flats in September dropped 2.8 per cent, and are down 11.6 per cent from their peak in April 2013, as reported by Channel News Asia.

On Wall Street Thursday, stocks closed higher after minutes of the US Fed’s September meeting, which clarified the central bank’s decision not to raise interest rates, showed a more dovish stance. According to Reuters, the US Fed held off from a rate hike on concern that the US economic recovery might be derailed by the global economic slowdown. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 138.46 points, or 0.82 percent, to 17,050.75, the S&P 500 gained 17.6 points, or 0.88 percent, to 2,013.43 and the Nasdaq Composite added 19.64 points, or 0.41 percent, to 4,810.79.