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Selling continued at the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) as investor sentiments remained negative after talks between Islamabad and Kabul failed to bring any solution, with the benchmark KSE-100 Index settling with a loss of over 1,600 points on Wednesday. At close, the benchmark index settled at 158,465.05, a decrease of 1,635.97 points or 1.02%. Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Attaullah Tarar said early on Wednesday that the latest round of talks between Islamabad and Kabul in Istanbul failed to bring about any workable solution as “the Afghan side kept deviating from the core issue and evaded the key point”. The talks in Istanbul began on Saturday after the worst border fighting since the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of Kabul. On Tuesday, PSX witnessed a sharp and broad-based sell-off as heavy institutional offloading and profit-taking drove the index into a steep decline. The KSE-100 Index plunged by 2,062.78 points, or 1.27%, to close at 160,101.03. Internationally, Asian shares got a lift from Wall Street on Wednesday thanks to a fresh wave of optimism over artificial intelligence, as investors braced for a busy day headlined by the Federal Reserve’s decision and earnings from technology heavyweights. The prospect of lower US rates this week supported bonds, while the dollar sustained losses as investors bet Wednesday’s expected Fed cut would not be the last for the year. Overnight, Wall Street closed at record highs after upbeat news from Nvidia and Microsoft, with the former announcing $500 billion in bookings for its AI chips and that it would build seven supercomputers for the US Department of Energy. Microsoft meanwhile, reached a deal allowing OpenAI to restructure into a public benefit corporation while giving the software giant a stake of 27% in the ChatGPT maker. That helped propel stocks in Asia higher, with MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rising 0.16% while Japan’s Nikkei jumped more than 1% to hit another record. South Korea’s Kospi similarly scaled an all-time high, helped by strong earnings and a bullish outlook from SK Hynix, an Nvidia supplier.
