Asia-Pacific markets rise as investors shrug off overnight Wall Street volatility

SINGAPORE — Shares in Asia-Pacific rose in Tuesday morning trade as investors in the region shrugged off losses seen overnight on Wall Street.

Japan's Nikkei 225 gained 0.54% in early trade while the Topix index climbed 0.59%. Shares of conglomerate SoftBank Group, however, slipped about 0.4% after the Financial Times reported that the firm's sale of chip business Arm to Nvidia had collapsed.

Elsewhere, South Korea's Kospi jumped 1.1%, with shares of chipmaker SK Hynix rising about 2%.

In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 climbed 0.9% in morning trade.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan traded 0.32% higher.

Overnight on Wall Street, the Nasdaq Composite led losses overnight among the major indexes stateside, falling 0.58% to 14,015.67.

The S&P 500 also declined 0.37% to 4,483.87 while the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed just 1.39 points to 35,091.13.

Global markets have continued to see a wave of volatility as investors continue to assess the outlook for factors such as central bank policy normalization, with expectations that fast-rising wages in the U.S. could lead the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even higher this year.

"For now at least, inflation and related central bank thinking remains by far the bigger influence on market sentiment," Ray Attrill, head of foreign exchange strategy at National Australia Bank, wrote in a Tuesday note.

The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of its peers, was at 95.399 — off levels around 95.2 seen late last week.

The Japanese yen traded at 115.07 per dollar following its strengthening yesterday from levels above 115.2 against the greenback. The Australian dollar was at $0.7126 after yesterday's climb from below $0.708.