News

Investing.com – Australia stocks were higher after the close on Wednesday, as gains in the Consumer Staples, Financials and A-REITs sectors led shares higher.

Lego's sales of its colorful plastic bricks outpaced the overall toy market in the first half of the year, driven by strong demand in Europe and North America, the Denmark-based toymaker said on Wednesday. The family-owned Lego company said sales from January through June rose 13% to 31 billion Danish crowns ($4.65 billion). By comparison, Lego increased first-half sales by 1% last year and 17% in 2022, year over year.

In this piece, I evaluated two technology stocks: Palantir Technologies (PLTR) and Alphabet (GOOGL). A closer look suggests a neutral view of Palantir and a bullish view of Alphabet. Palantir Technologies specializes in big data analytics, while Alphabet is a holding company that owns the Google search engine and sells apps and content on Google Play and YouTube. Alphabet also generates revenue from cloud services fees, licensing revenue, and hardware products like Chromebooks and other devices.

Investing.com – Taiwan stocks were higher after the close on Wednesday, as gains in the Glass, Financials and Electronic Products Distribution sectors led shares higher.

Asian shares were mostly lower Wednesday, despite a record high on Wall Street, as investors awaited a closely watched earnings report from Nvidia. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 edged up 0.2% in afternoon trading to 38,352.07. Toyota stock jumped 3.7% after Japanese media reported Japan’s top automaker was going to announce a cooperative agreement on fuel cells with European automaker BMW.

Gold prices slipped on Wednesday as the dollar ticked up, while investors awaited a key U.S. inflation report due this week for more clarity on the size of a likely September rate cut. Spot gold fell 0.7% to $2,507.64 per ounce by 0531 GMT. "Market seems to be waiting for a catalyst to ignite the potential bullish breakthrough above that $2,532 level," said Kelvin Wong, OANDA's senior market analyst for Asia Pacific.

VerSe Innovation, India's content tech unicorn that owns local language news aggregator Dailyhunt, digital newsstand platform Magzter and short-video app Josh, has acquired digital marketing firm Valueleaf Group in a cash and equity deal. Valueleaf will help VerSe to bolster its presence in the Indian digital ad space and build a significant retargeting platform, countering the likes of Google, which also backs the startup, and local contenders including InMobi. Digital ad spending in India is growing as consumption across online platforms expands in the world's most populous country.