Australian shares ended higher on Thursday, as investors took cues from an upbeat Wall Street session on U.S. stimulus prospects, with gains powered by domestic tech sector as buy-now-pay-later giant Afterpay surged around 10%.
The S&P/ASX 200 index extended gains to a second session, ending 0.43% higher at 6,715.3 points.
"I haven't seen much in the way of huge impactful news, so the markets are happy to follow a relatively okay U.S. session," said Nick Twidale, chief executive officer of APAC, FP Markets.
Wall Street's benchmark S&P 500 index closed slightly higher on Wednesday, as investors waited for details of the next U.S. fiscal stimulus plan and as Congress began President Donald Trump's impeachment hearings. [.N]
"I would classify it as hopefully bullish," Twidale said.
Back home, tech stocks were the stand-outs of the session on Thursday, closing 4.7% higher after three straight days of losses.
Afterpay led gains in the sector after Morgan Stanley raised its price target by over 13%, on expectations that it would continue building a global BNPL platform in 2021.
Also driving Australian BNPLs higher was the stellar Nasdaq debut of Affirm Holdings, which ended its first day with a valuation of more than $23 bln.
Twidale expects technology stocks to continue to benefit as long as the investors remain in risk-on mode, as the market looks to move back to normalization in 2021.
Financials climbed 0.8%, with the so-called "Big Four" banks adding between 0.4% and 1.9%.
On the downside, gold stocks and miners lost 1.5% and 0.8%, respectively, brought down by falling gold prices as U.S. Treasury yields and the dollar rebounded. [GOL/]
Energy stocks closed 0.3% lower, tracking a dip in oil prices, but a nearly 3% jump in Whitehaven Coal's shares after a 29% surge in the coal miner's quarterly output limited losses in the sub-index. [O/R]
In New Zealand, the benchmark S&P/NZX 50 index slid 0.03% to finish flat.
(Reporting by Arundhati Dutta in Bengaluru, Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
