File picture: Willie Cloete. File picture: Willie Cloete.
Singapore - Asian shares were mostly lower on Tuesday, while oil prices hovered near one-year highs on growing expectations of an output cut by OPEC producers.
European markets also look set for a lacklustre start, with financial spreadbetters predicting Britain's FTSE 100 will open 0.3 percent lower, Germany's DAX will begin the day down 0.1 percent and France's CAC 40 will be flat at the open.
Brent crude slipped 0.2 percent to $53.05 a barrel after surging as much as 3 percent on Monday. U.S. crude futures dipped a similar amount to $51.26, after jumping to a four-month high in the previous session.
The overnight gains came after Russia said it was ready to join the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries in limiting crude output and Algeria called for similar commitments from other non-OPEC producers.
OPEC aims for agreements to cut about 700,000 barrels per day in its first reduction in eight years.
“The rally was purely sentiment-driven as the details of how this would actually work are still pretty thin on the ground, but given Russia is the biggest oil producer in the world any deal that gets them to cut back will be seen as a big positive for the oil market,” Angus Nicholson, market analyst at IG in Melbourne, wrote in a note.
In equity markets, MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan retreated 1.1 percent after creeping higher on Monday as investors saw less likelihood of Republican Donald Trump winning next month's presidential election.
But Japan's Nikkei closed up 1 percent at the highest level in more than a month, thanks to a weaker yen.
In South Korea, Samsung Electronics slumped 7.4 percent and was on track for its biggest one-day decline in more than four years as the company struggles to contain a deepening crisis over its Galaxy Note7 phone.
The company halted sales of Note7 phones on Tuesday and told owners to stop using them while it investigates reports of fires in the devices, fuelling expectations the tech giant may scrap the flagship device.
The world's top smartphone maker has recalled 2.5 million Note7s because of faulty batteries, and the latest reports of fires in replacement devices have raised new doubts about Samsung's quality control.
Samsung pulled South Korea's KOSPI down 1.2 percent.
China's CSI 300 index advanced 0.2 percent and the Shanghai Composite rallied 0.4 percent, after Beijing unveiled guidelines to cut massive corporate debt, potentially leading to consolidation among some state-owned companies and drawing more investor interest into equities.
Hong Hong's Hang Seng index slid 1.5 percent.
Overnight, US stock indexes closed up between 0.5 percent and 0.7 percent, after the pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index ended the day 0.9 percent higher.
US stocks were helped by a buoyant energy sector, as well as the view that “Donald Trump's campaign appears to be unravelling as influential figures within his own party start to peel away from him,” Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets in London, wrote in a note.
The dollar extended overnight gains on growing expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates this year.
Traders have priced in a 70 percent chance the Fed will hike at its Dec. 13-14 policymakers' meeting, up from 66 percent early Friday, according to CME Group's FedWatch tool.
Investors are looking to Wednesday's release of minutes of the latest Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting to see how close the Fed was to hiking rates last month.
The US dollar strengthened 0.3 percent to 104.01 yen on Tuesday, adding to its 0.7 percent gain on Monday.
The dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of six global peers, added 0.2 percent to 97.12, after climbing 0.3 percent on Monday.
The euro inched down 0.1 percent to $1.11225.
The beaten-down British pound continued its drop, falling 0.4 percent to $1.2307 on Tuesday, down 5.1 percent this month.
The Mexican peso held on to most of the 2 percent it gained against the US dollar on Monday, reflecting views that Trump's chances of winning the election were diminishing. Trump has been sharply critical of Mexican migration and trade.
REUTERS