In Tokyo, the clock chimed in with a clear plus, but after an hour and a half of trading, both the Nikkei 225 and Topix had slid down towards zero again.
The Chinese stock markets started clearly on the plus side. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng is up just over 1 percent after almost half an hour of trading, and on the mainland the composite indices in Shanghai and Shenzhen are both at +0.6.
In Seoul, traders have already started to look ahead to 2023 when the stock exchange opens next time. Thursday, which was the last trading day of the year, became symptomatic for the whole of 2022 with a decline of almost two percent. Over the course of the year, shareholders have seen a quarter of the value of the companies included in Kospi erased.