PSEi rallies on bets of dovish US Fed

THE LOCAL stock market opened the week in an upbeat mood on rising bets that the US interest rate lift-off won’t happen for the rest of the year.

The main-share Philippine Stock Exchange index racked up 111.32 points or 1.63 percent to close at 6,961.93 on Monday.

Elsewhere in the region, stock markets surged as sluggish US jobs data released on Friday created expectations that the US Federal Reserve won’t hike interest rates this December. The lift-off was earlier anticipated to happen by September but the turmoil in China constrained the US Fed from doing so, afterwards pushing back lift-off expectations to December. But with the weak US payrolls data in September, expectations for the lift-off have been further pushed back to March 2016, at the earliest.

At the local market, all counters gained, led by the services and property counters which both went up by over 2 percent.

Reflecting the improved risk appetite, there was a modest P94 million in net foreign selling at the local bourse. This marked the fourth straight session that local equities attracted net foreign inflows.

Value turnover for the day amounted to P9.15 billion. There were 112 advancers that overwhelmed 65 decliners while 32 stocks were unchanged.

SMPH, PLDT and Metrobank led the PSEi higher, respectively, rising by 4.88 percent, 4.03 percent and 4.94 percent while LTG rose by 3.94 percent.

GTCAP was up by 2.47 percent while ALI, URC, Meralco, ICTSI, BPI, RLC and Jollibee were all up by over 1 percent. AC, SMIC, JG Summit and AEV all firmed up.

On the other hand, Globe slumped by 1.02 percent while AGI and MPI also slipped.