Stocks in Asia Pacific were set to trade mixed on Thursday following record highs touched by the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite overnight on Wall Street.
Governor Philip Lowe's speech at 11:05 a.m. HK/SIN on Thursday for clues about the central bank's future policy moves.
Shares of semiconductors are also in focus after the VanEck Vectors Semiconductor ETF jumped 2.7% to hit a record overnight stateside, led by a 7.4% rally in Texas Instruments sparked bySouth Korean chipmaker SK Hynix reported second-quarter earnings before the market open. Tumbling memory chip prices led to an 89% drop in operating profit for the reporting period to 638 billion Korean won , which also missed analysts' expectations, Reuters reported.
"The risk is the ECB loosens monetary policy tonight which can further undermine , " Joseph Capurso, senior currency strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, wrote in a note. "Our base case is for the ECB to remove its forward guidance tonight that interest rates will remain 'at their present level through the first half of 2020, and in any case for as long as necessary'," Capurso said.
Ahead of that meeting, the euro traded at $1.1141 after slipping from levels above $1.12 seen earlier in the trading week., which tracks the greenback against a basket of its peers, was at 97.729 after touching lows around 97.6 yesterday.
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