At 12.30pm, the FBM KLCI was up 5.48 points to 1,578.99 as investors picked up on bargains. The market breadth was positive with 615 gainers to 389 decliners, suggesting a broad-based retracement on oversold counters.
"We think the FBM KLCI is steeply oversold, bargain hunting may emerge over the near term tracking Wall Street overnight gains on technology stocks.
"We believe the broader market may recover but we expect the rebound to be short-lived and traders may adopt selling into strength strategy," said Malacca Securities Research.
From a technical perspective, the FBM KLCI had broken through the support at 1,580, and the technical indicators had turned negative.
"We believe the key index may perform a technical rebound with the resistance pegged at 1,60-1,625 while the next support is set around 1,550-1,560," said Malacca Securities.
Glove stocks, which had seen a downturn in sentiment following the US Customs and Border Protection determining a finding of forced labour in Top Glove's production process, also retraced their recent steep losses.
Top Glove rose 10 sen to RM4.62, Hartalega
gained six sen to RM8.99 and Supermax climbed 10 sen to RM3.91.However, there remained some softness in financial stocks in line with the retreat in global banks following the default of a US hedge fund. Hong Leong Bank dropped 14 sen to RM18.56, Maybank slid one sen to RM8.24 and CIMB shed one sen to RM4.33. Public Bank rose three sen to RM4.23.
Of actives, Berjaya Corp
slid 2.5 sen to 43 sen, Dagang Nexchange gained 2.5 sne to 93.5 sen and JKG Land jumped three sen to 13.5 sen.Asian markets also rose on the back of optimistic manufacturing data.
Japan's Nikkei rose 0.6%, South Korea's Kospi climbed 0.7%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng gained 1.1% and China's composite index added 0.25%.
Australia's ASX200 was up 0.4%.