Only three months left in this year 2017. Time for our quarterly snapshot of an APAC market performance ranking. October is known to be historically the month with the highest volatility in the year. November and December are often two well performing months due to the tendency of a year-end rally.[mepr-active membership=”1734″ ifallowed=”show” unauth=”message” unauth_message=”Please login or purchase a membership to view full text.”]
In our stock market performance graph, we have marked in different colors the gains reached by the single stock market indices until the end of January, the end of the first, second and third quarter. This can be helpful to better see the market dynamic in these different periods of the year. We have observed in the past that strong trends which develop already in January last mostly until the end of the year, provided that no significant incidences and turbulences will occur. Let’s see how much of this past observation is true for this year too.
Hong Kong, Philippines, and Singapore have been the top three performing Asian markets in January of this year. Especially Hong Kong continued to keep a steady and robust growth momentum throughout all three quarters and remained the top performing market in Asia Pacific so far. The Philippines stock market held its position among the top three since January and closed the third quarter with a gain of 19 percent. Singapore lost momentum in the third quarter and ended up with a seventh position and a performance of 12 percent. Nevertheless, we believe that Singapore could catch up some performance and surprise with a year-end rally.
South Korea started in January with a performance of only two percent, gained momentum in the second quarter where it advanced to 18 percent, then stagnated during the third quarter. A similar development can be observed in other Asian markets. India, Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia progressed well at double-digit rates until mid of the year, then stalled or advanced by only one percent during the third quarter.
The best market performance in the third quarter only showed Hong Kong, Thailand and China with growth rates between five and seven percent. We believe that especially Thailand and China could follow up on this high growth momentum and outperform the other Asian markets in the remaining months of this year.
On the lower end of our ranking are Australia and Japan. The Australia stock market index did not return any profits so far. Japan, after a bad start in January with a drop of one percent, caught up performance and gained five percent until the end of June, but then lost momentum again and advanced by only one percent during the third quarter.
We are optimistic that the general market condition remains favorable until the end of the year. Despite the good performances we saw so far, many stock markets in Asia Pacific are still not overpriced or overheated. We will have a closer look at the market valuation in APAC countries in our next posts. Stay tuned!
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