Shares opened lower in Europe on Thursday after a mixed session in Asia, where a rebound in oil prices eclipsed another broad rally on Wall Street.
South Korea’s Kospi soared 8.4% to 7,815.59, helped by strong buying of technology shares such as Samsung Electronics, which gained 8.5% after its labor union and management reached an agreement late Wednesday that averted a potentially costly strike. Shares in SK Hynix, a computer chipmaker partnering
with Nvidia, surged 11.2%.
The advance was partly powered by a stronger-than-expected quarterly report from chipmaker Nvidia, whose profit rocketed more than 200% higher in the February-April quarter from a year earlier, while revenue jumped 85%.
Nvidia has been one of the biggest beneficiaries from the boom in artificial intelligence, thanks to powerful demand for its high-end AI chips. Its shares rose 1.3% on Wednesday before its earnings report was released, but they fell 1.3% in afterhours trading after the announcement.
The Kospi has been breaching records, recently exceeding 8,000 for the first time.
U.S. futures slipped, with the contract for the S&P 500 down 0.3%, while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.2%.
In early European trading, Germany's DAX gave up 0.3% to 24,669.59, while the CAC 40 in Paris lost 0.2% to 8,102.25. Britain's FTSE 100 shed 0.4% to 10,393.56.
In other Asian trading, Tokyo's Nikkei 225 jumped 3.1% to 61,684.14 after the government reported that Japan’s exports rose nearly 15% in April from a year earlier, despite shocks from the Iran war.
Technology-related shares were among the biggest winners, with Tokyo Electron gaining 5.9% and Advantest up 4.4%.
Taiwan's Taiex, also heavily weighted toward technology shares, gained 3.9% as major chipmaker TSMC's stock gained 3%.
Chinese markets declined, with Hong Kong's Hang Seng losing 1.2% to 25,352.82. The Shanghai Composite index dropped 2% to 4,077.28.
Indonesia's share benchmark dropped 3.3% as the market absorbed the impact of a government decision to put strategic natural resource exports such as coal under state control.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 picked up 1.5% to 8,621.70.
Oil prices pushed higher early Thursday, a day after Brent crude had dropped 5%. Brent, the international standard, gained $1.46 to $106.48 per barrel, while U.S. benchmark crude added $1.53 to $99.79 per barrel.
Brent remains well above its roughly $70 level from before the war with Iran. Prices have been yo-yoing on rising and falling hopes that the United States and Iran can reach an agreement to allow oil deliveries to fully resume from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide.
On Wednesday, U.S. stocks bounced back, with the S&P 500 gaining 1.1% for its first rise in four days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 1.3% and the Nasdaq composite rallied 1.5%.
Stocks got a lift from easing yields in the bond market, as the yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.57% from 4.67% late Tuesday. That's a significant move for a market that measures things in hundredths of a percentage point.
The 10-year Treasury yield had been rising from less than 4% before the war with Iran began, along with other government bond yields around the world, because of worries that the fighting will keep oil prices high, among other factors
High yields slow economies and weigh on prices for stocks, cryptocurrencies and all kinds of other investments. Besides driving up rates for mortgages, they could also curtail companies’ borrowing to build the artificial-intelligence data centers that have been supporting the U.S. economy’s growth recently.
With the easing of yields, technology stocks helped lead Wall Street higher. Advanced Micro Devices jumped 8.1%, while Intel gained 7.4%.
Smaller companies can feel even bigger relief from lower yields than their bigger rivals because many need to borrow to grow. The Russell 2000 index of the smallest U.S. stocks jumped 2.6%, more than double the gain of the S&P 500, which measures the biggest U.S. stocks.
Most big U.S. companies have reported better profits for the start of 2026 than analysts expected, which has helped stocks run to records. Stock prices tend to follow the path of corporate profits over the long term.
In other dealings early Thursday, the U.S. dollar rose to 159.05 Japanese yen from 158.92 yen. The euro slipped to $1.1601 from $1.1624.
