[MARKET ANALYSIS] Asia-Pac stocks are mixed as the region attempts to shrug off last Friday's tech rout and amid cautiousness ahead of the midterms

APAC Stocks: Mixed

• Asia-Pac stocks are ultimately mixed as the region partially shrugs off last Friday's continued tech rout on Wall St, where the Nasdaq briefly dipped into correction territory following weak key earnings, while participants are also cautious ahead of the US midterm elections on Tuesday and second-guess whether US President Trump will resume strikes on Iran post-election, although there are some hopes for diplomacy after Iran held talks with Qatari mediators in Doha.

ASX 200: -0.6%

• Index is dragged lower by underperformance in miners, materials, resources and financials heading into a widely expected rate hike by the RBA tomorrow and with Westpac indecisive following its earnings results.

Nikkei 225: -0.3%

• Price action is choppy but with the index off its worst levels after reclaiming the 63,000 level.

KOSPI +1.5%

• Clawed back the initial tech-related losses to outperform its regional peers, with South Korean President Lee pledging that the government will nearly double AI investment spending next year to KRW 21.3tln, while he also commented that the Future Response Fund will be a strategic investment platform, as well as a fiscal stability mechanism.

Hang Seng & Shanghai Comp: Hang Seng +0.1% / Shanghai Comp +0.5%

• Chinese markets are kept afloat following a recent slew of earnings, including from China's big four banks, which all posted profit growth and with the PBoC meeting with Chinese regulators and major banks to discuss measures to support the capital market. In addition, the central bank announced changes to its 7-day reverse repo operations and shifted to overnight reverse repos as its main policy anchor, while participants also digest the latest PMI data, which were mixed as the official releases missed expectations and fell into contraction territory, but the Chinese RatingDog Manufacturing PMI continued to show an expansion.

US Equity Futures: Positive

• Rebounded from last Friday's selling pressure, but with the upside capped as participants await looming key events including Apple's earnings after-hours and tomorrow's midterm elections.

European Equity Futures +0.3%

• Indicate a mildly positive cash market open with Euro Stoxx 50 futures up 0.3% after the cash market closed with losses of 1.2% on Friday.

This is the standard overnight wrap format rather than a single event: the read across is that regional sessions taking their cue from a Wall Street tech-led selloff tend to diverge along sector composition lines, with commodity-heavy indices (ASX) tracking resources and bank earnings while hardware-export markets (KOSPI, Nikkei) are hostage to the Nasdaq complex. Seoul's outperformance on a government AI spending pledge fits the established pattern of fiscal announcements dominating index-level direction in markets with concentrated tech weightings, though such pledges historically move the AI supply chain names more durably than the broad index. The PBoC's shift of its policy anchor toward overnight reverse repos is the kind of operational plumbing change that matters for onshore liquidity signalling rather than for immediate rates, and central bank meetings with regulators and big banks to discuss capital market support have in past episodes preceded targeted measures rather than broad stimulus. The divergence between the official PMI in contraction and the private survey in expansion is a recurring split, with the official gauge skewed toward larger state-linked firms; markets have tended to treat the private print as the better read on momentum. The immediate calendar (RBA decision widely priced, Apple earnings, US midterms) puts the session in a holding pattern, the usual condition in which overnight ranges compress and follow-through waits on the catalyst.