Alibaba's record $31-billion Singles' Day sales fail to cheer investors

Monday’s meagre volume across Asian stock markets means one thing: everyone’s waiting for solid news to trade on before getting overly excited one way or another.

Most benchmarks in the region posted moves between 0.1 per cent and 0.8 per cent in either direction. A gauge tracking volatility in Japan’s Nikkei 225 Stock Average dropped for a fifth straight session.

Even a $31-billion record sales figure from Alibaba Group’s Singles’ Day didn’t give stocks a big lift (consumer shares in the MSCI Asia Pacific Index fell). 

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Tim Culpan said savvy investors would do well not to get caught up in the fluff and hype of the famous sales event.

The one notable exception was China — the Shanghai Composite Index erased earlier losses to climb for the first time in six sessions as Premier Li Keqiang promised more support for the private sector, over the weekend. Its ChiNext gauge of small-cap and technology stocks advanced 3.5 per cent.

Apart from that, what solid news are investors waiting for? Corporate profit and economic growth outlooks are both on top of their minds. 

Everyone’s going to be watching Asian tech behemoth Tencent Holdings (the beaten down T in the BAT complex), which is slated to report its third-quarter results this week. Analysts have trimmed their estimates without mercy — Goldman Sachs cut its target price by 17 percent, after CICC lowered its projection by 16 pe rcent last week, shows data compiled by Bloomberg.

There’s also the US CPI numbers on Wednesday, which could move the greenback and in turn impact markets in this region. 

The docket this week also includes a plethora of speeches by US Fed officials and retail sales numbers that will provide an important glimpse into the tone of economic activity, inflation and fedspeak through the end of the year.

Of course, if there’s any new information, the US-China trade war will also give investors a reason to make decisions.