SET in Risk of Further Decline after Regional Markets Open Lower, Following Wall Street

Stocks in Asia opened lower on Thursday morning as investors continued to weigh the impact of the coronavirus outbreak after the IMF had made a huge cut on global GDP in 2020 from a 3.3% expansion to a 3% contraction.

 

As of 9:00 local time in Thailand (GMT+7) Nikkei fell 1.30%, SSEC slipped 0.24%, HSI dropped 0.93%, ASX 200 plunged 1.48% and Kospi dipped 0.33%.

Over the night, Dow Jones shed 445.41 points or 1.86% to settle at 23,504.35 points, S&P 500 fell 2.20% and Nasdaq dropped 1.44%.

Concerns over the impact of coronavirus to the world’s economy continued to weigh on investors sentiment since there were yet to be any signs of the virus to be contained in the major hotspot, although the cases and deaths in Europe started to decline slowly.

In the statement published on April 14, IMF estimated that the U.S. economy is projected to decline this year by 5.9%, the Euro area to plunge by 7.5%, Thailand to contract by 6.7%, while China will grow only 1.2%.

Yesterday, the U.S. Commerce Department published the data which showed a drop of retail sales stateside in March of a record 8.7% which is the largest one-month drop since the department began tracking in 1992.

 

SET Index closed at 1,236.10 points, declined 20.25 points or 1.61% with a trading value of 69.4 billion baht. The analyst stated that the SET Index faced a profit-taking after a long rally for the past few days, while the technical signal showed that the market was overbought.

The analyst anticipated that the market could be worrying about the decline in the earnings of banking sectors which will be released their financial statements in the next few days. Moreover, Local Institutions had made a net buy for the total of 30 billion baht in the past five weeks, causing the market to worry of a sudden selloff if the banking sectors earnings had a bad outlook.