US stocks are expected to open slightly higher while hovering around all-time highs on Tuesday after China said its top trade envoy and other senior officials spoke by phone with U.S. negotiators.
Technology shares on Wall Street rallied on Monday. This was prompted by China’s new guidelines for the protection of patents and copyrights. Theft of intellectual property has been a big sticking point in the U.S.-China trade war.
U.S. shares were set to be little changed with Dow futures up less than 0.1% at 28,050. S&P 500 futures were flat at 3,132.60.
Markets witnessed the stricter guidelines as an encouraging sign for negotiations on the first phase of a deal aimed at ending the tariff war between the world’s two largest economies.
“There is renewed hope on some progress of U.S.-China trade talk after China’s state-backed news media Global Times said that both sides are ‘very close’ to phase one deal,” said Zhu Huani, at Mizuho Bank in Singapore.
There was an announcement by China’s Commerce Ministry early Tuesday that top trade negotiators from both sides spoke by phone and agreed to continue talks, but that did not seem to spur significant gains. That might be because the vaguely worded notice did not mention specifics or indicate the level of progress that has been made.
The plan had been that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping might meet and sign an agreement at a Pacific Rim summit in Chile. That was canceled due to political unrest, and now there has been no announcement of plans for a meeting elsewhere.
“Surely both sides aren’t going to walk us down the garden path only to take us down the rabbit hole again with Trump and Xi,” Stephen Innes of AxiTrader said in a commentary.
Are you optimistic about stocks because of this recent uptick due to renewed hope between the U.S. and China? We look forward to seeing your comments in the section just below this article.
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