Strota/ Newsroom/ Global Markets/ 2026-10-02

Nikkei jumped 2.6%

Strota Newsroom · Global Markets · session of 2026-10-02 · market close

Nikkei 225 closed at 68,491.33 on 2026-10-02, jumped 2.6% on the session and is +36.1% year-to-date. Here is what the market data shows.

Japan's Nikkei 225 gained 2.6% in the session of October 2, closing at 68,491.33. The advance extended a firm stretch for the benchmark, which was up 4.54% over the past week and 3.14% over the past month by the close.

That finish left the index 5.35% below its 52-week high of 72,366.34 and 52.42% above its 52-week low of 44,936.73. It closed above both its 50-day simple moving average, at 65,488.93, and its 200-day average, at 60,220.77; a moving average is simply the mean closing level over that trailing window, and traders use the two as rough gauges of short- and long-term trend. Year to date the Nikkei was up 36.06%, yet over three months it was still down 1.41%, so the gains of recent weeks had not fully recovered ground given up earlier in the quarter.

Only two peers in the pack had data for the same October 2 session. South Korea's KOSPI also rose, by 1.98%, while Australia's ASX 200 moved the other way, falling 1.55%. Even on the same day, then, the strength was not shared across the whole region.

The other peers' latest closes came from earlier sessions and are not a like-for-like comparison. In the US, the most recent figures were from October 1, when the S&P 500 rose 0.19% and the Nasdaq and the Dow each added 0.04%. The rest dated from September 30. In Europe that day, the FTSE 100 fell 0.29%, the DAX 0.79%, the CAC 40 0.89% and the Euro Stoxx 50 0.81%. Elsewhere in Asia, the Hang Seng gained 0.37%, Shanghai 0.31% and Taiwan's TAIEX 0.65%, while in India the Sensex slipped 0.07% and the Nifty 50 0.42%.

The headlines in the pack did not describe this session. A GuruFocus report published a day earlier said the Tokyo market had rebounded strongly in a prior session, and a tradingkey.com report from two days earlier described Japanese and South Korean shares closing lower. A livemint.com piece from more than a week before discussed a three-day closure of the Japanese market. The freshest headline in the pack concerned Indian equities, not Japan, and the remaining items were months old.

What the data established was the size of the move, where it left the Nikkei within its range and relative to its averages, and that the KOSPI also rose that day while the ASX 200 fell. It did not establish a driver for the 2.6% gain, and none of the reports in the pack accounted for it.

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Around the world (same session)

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How this article was made: Strota assembled the market data above (the index's price history, same-session peer-market moves and public headlines) and an AI model wrote the narrative strictly from that evidence — it is not permitted to add outside facts or numbers. Every figure comes from the underlying market/public data.