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Japan's Nikkei average finished at the day's high on Friday, up 1.36 percent on a surge in blue chip stocks such as Honda Motor Co after good earnings results the day before.
But the market was driven more by short-term trading and company-specific factors such as earnings results rather than any specific trends, with trade thin as participants sidelined themselves ahead of the weekend.
"There's a general sense that the Nikkei is still lower than it really should be, with some technical factors likely to also help push it towards the 16,600 level," said Masayoshi Okamoto, head of dealing at Jujiya Securities. Other dealers agreed, noting that participants appeared eager to buy on dips, with some short-covering emerging as well, but that trading energy was low.
"It's Friday, and that's sidelining some people. Others want to wait and see what happens next week, which features a lot more Japanese company earnings as well as a US Federal Reserve meeting next Wednesday," said Yutaka Miura, senior technical analyst at Shinko Securities.
"Once the Fed meeting's over, things could well run out of steam, especially if they only cut overnight rates by 25 basis points as the market expects." The market could gain more upward impetus next week after Nissan Motor Co posted a surprise 12 percent gain in quarterly operating profit after the closing, saying a pickup in its global car sales outweighed rising commodity prices.
It kept its full-year forecasts unchanged. Both Honda and Sony Corp jumped by nearly 9 percent after earnings results that many participants said were good but not necessarily good enough to provoke such rises, given the uncertainties faced by both companies over the coming months. "Basically, they just ended up looking good within the context of today's market rise, setting off short-covering," said Jujiya's Okamoto.
The benchmark Nikkei closed up 221.46 points at 16,505.63. The broader TOPIX index was up 1.7 percent at 1,573.97. Trade was light, with 1.7 billion shares changing hands, compared with last month's daily average of 1.9 billion. Advancing shares beat decliners by two to one.
Honda jumped 8.9 percent to 4,040 yen after Japan's second-biggest automaker posted a forecast-beating 63 percent jump in quarterly earnings as strong sales of its new CR-V crossover made up for higher raw materials costs, and raised its full-year net profit forecast on a lower tax rate.
Sony surged to end up by 8.8 percent at 5,560 yen after the consumer electronics giant reported a swing to a quarterly operating profit on Thursday on strong sales of personal computers and digital cameras and raised its full-year forecast by 2 percent.
Nissan, Japan's third-biggest automaker held 44 percent by Renault SA, ended up by 3.2 percent at 1,124 yen prior to the earnings announcement. July-September operating profit at Nissan was 218.71 billion yen ($1.91 billion), beating an average estimate of 183.5 billion yen in a survey of four brokerages by Reuters Estimates.

Copyright Reuters, 2007

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