Alibaba, JD stocks rally on easing COVID restrictions in China

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre breaks down how Asia stocks are responding to news that China is easing COVID restrictions in Beijing.

Video transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

RACHELLE AKUFFO: All right, well, Asia markets rallied on the expectation of China easing its zero COVID stance. Let's go to Jared Blikre for more. Jared, what are you seeing?

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. We've got to start with the currency situation. This heatmap right here are the world currencies, with the US dollar. It's green if the US dollar is up over the last three days, red if it's in the red, in other words, the US dollar down. And we can see a lot more red. And that is a good thing for risk markets around the world.

Let me just show you what's happening with the yuan here over in China. This is a one-month chart, down 3 and 1/2 percent. Doesn't seem like a big percentage. That is a lot in currency terms. On a year to date chart, you can see, all this strengthening by the US dollar, this is a little bit of easing. And this has been a welcome respite for the markets.

This has allowed a very strong rally in Chinese stocks, which really perked up long before US equities. And this was before the October rally. But just check out what's happened over the last three days. That is basically since Tuesday, some huge outsize gains by Alibaba, Pinduoduo, Baidu, a lot of these names up double digits.

And when you take a look at the one-month return and sort by performance here, some of these names have actually doubled in value. You can see Dada up there up 100%. So bottom line is Chinese stocks took off first. There was a lot of headline risk. But those were the most beaten down ones. And now they have caught the risk vibe.

So we'll see how long it lasts. US dollar is weakening, that is a headwind for not only these assets but most assets out there, risk assets.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, certainly a turnaround from what we have seen over the last few weeks. Jared, thanks so much for that.