The Asian stock markets are looking at a mixed lead with little movement on Wednesday, after moving mostly lower in the previous session.
Profit taking from last week's rallies is expected to limit the upside, as well as uncertainty about the effectiveness of the Federal Reserve's recently announced third round of quantitative easing.
Providing support, the National Association of Home Builders showing that U.S. homebuilder confidence improved for the fifth straight month in September and reached a six-year high.
The major U.S. averages ended mixed and little changed on Tuesday. The Dow inched up 11.54 points or 0.1 percent to finish at 13,564.64, while the NASDAQ edged down 0.87 points or less than a tenth of a percent to end at 3,177.80 and the S&P 500 slipped 1.87 points or 0.1 percent to close at 1,459.32.
The major European markets were down again on Tuesday as the DAX of Germany fell 0.76 percent and the CAC 40 of France lost 1.15 percent. The FTSE 100 of the U.K. dropped 0.18 percent and the SMI of Switzerland decreased 0.23 percent.
The Asian markets were mostly lower on Tuesday as China's Shanghai Composite lost 0.91 percent, while Indonesia fell 0.74 percent, Thailand gave away 0.44 percent, Japan's Nikkei dropped 0.39 percent, Taiwan was off 0.36 percent, Singapore's Straits Times declined 0.35 percent, New Zealand fell 0.33 percent, Hong Kong's Hang Seng shed 0.27 percent, India dipped 0.25 percent, Malaysia retreated 0.16 percent, Australia eased 0.09 percent and South Korea's KOSPI added 0.13 percent.
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