Nomura joins Morgan Stanley in calling bottom for battered Asia stocks

Bloomberg

Nomura Holdings Inc strategists have joined their peers at Morgan Stanley in calling a bottom for battered Asian equities, including chipmakers.
The Japanese broker said the asset class may bottom “in the next few weeks” after reviewing indicators on the last 12 US recessions and five chip cycles. Morgan Stanley strategists including Jonathan Garner made a similar call in an October 4 note amid “abundant” signs of extreme selling.
The risk-reward is “quite attractive on Asian stocks” for an investment horizon of more than a year, strategists including Chetan Seth wrote in a note dated October 18. A sustained recovery “may occur sometime in the first half of 2023” assuming no delays in China’s
reopening and that a US recession doesn’t go beyond the year, they added.
The Federal Reserve’s resolve to curtail high inflation with jumbo rate hikes has raised fears of recession and put pressure on risk assets. But in Asia, the pain is exacerbated by China’s problems.
Many of the region’s gauges feature among the world’s worst performing markets this year, often weighed by China’s Covid Zero policy and property crisis, and more recently, a rekindling of US-China tensions over tech supremacy.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index, which has lost 28% this year, is poised for its seventh quarterly underperformance in eight against MSCI World Index, according to Bloomberg data. The last time Asian gauge exhibited such a trend was in 2014.

China Property Shares advance
Shares of Chinese developers rose as two large builders plan to issue a second round of state-guaranteed bonds amid the sector’s ongoing liquidity crunch.
A Bloomberg Intelligence gauge of real estate firms climbed as much as 3.1% on Wednesday morning, bucking a broader decline in Hong Kong stocks. Longfor Group Holdings and Country Garden Holdings briefly jumped more than 6%.
Property stocks and dollar bonds surged in August when the state-guaranteed debt scheme became public, fuelling investor hopes that government support would help builders’ financing and boost property demand.
China’s high-yield dollar notes were little changed, according to credit traders, after hitting their latest record low a day earlier.