Asia trading steady; U.S. stocks rally

(CNN) -- Asian and Pacific markets opened minimally down on Tuesday, with Tokyo's Nikkei index bucking the trend and gaining .67 percent in early trading.

Australia's All Ordinaries index lost 1.13 percent, Seoul's KOSPI index was down .45 percent, the Shanghai composite index dropped .65 percent and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index slipped .08 percent in the early going.

The moderate movement contrasted with Wall Street's second consecutive session of gains during a day that saw the Dow Jones industrial average briefly top 9,000 for the first time in a month.

The Dow jumped 298 points, or 3.5 percent. The Standard & Poor's 500 index added 3.8 percent and the Nasdaq composite gained 4.1 percent.

"The bottoming process is taking place," Dave Hinnenkamp, CEO at KDV Wealth Management, said. He said that the market has priced in a lot of gloomy news and that the lows hit in late November were significant.

Between October 9, 2007, when the S&P 500 closed at an all-time high, and the recent low on November 20, the index has plunged 52 percent.

Investors welcomed U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's plan to create 2.5 million jobs by 2011 through public works projects and reports that government help for the automakers was on the way.

Automakers General Motors and Ford gained 18 percent and 17 percent respectively, as congressional Democrats sent the White House a proposal that would give the Big 3 up to $15 billion in federal loans as early as December 15.

Other shares that went up Monday were American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

Dow stock Alcoa and other metal and mining stocks advanced along with the price of the underlying commodities.

Dow stock Caterpillar rallied 13 percent. The heavy equipment maker is one of the companies that would benefit from Obama's infrastructure plan.

"We're in a very unsettled period where people's opinions swing between hope and fear on very little news," said Ken Kam, portfolio manager of the Masters 100 Fund. "Right now we are seeing the impact of the hope that maybe the worst is over."

Still, he said, it was too soon to see the recent upswing as anything other than a bear market rally.

Major European markets also closed higher. The French CAC was up 8.7 percent in trading, Germany's DAX climbed 7.6 percent, while the UK's FTSE 100 was up 6.2 5.89 percent.