Investing.com - Asian shares gained on Wednesday with mining firms in Australia leading that index higher.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 added 0.6% as regional sentiment was helped by a positive session on Wall Street overnight. The S&P 500 hit an intraday high on Tuesday, with stocks buoyed by strong housing data and upbeat earnings reports.
Trading in Sydney was also helped by gains in miners. BHP Billiton Ltd (ASX:BHP) rose 1.6% after the company said that its annual iron-ore production beat expectations. It produced 225 million tons of the steelmaking material compared with an earlier guidance of 217 million tons.
Elsewhere in the region, stocks were little moved as investors waited for fresh catalysts. In Japan, the Nikkei 225 was less than 0.1% higher.
South Korea's KOSPI rose 0.2%, and the Hang Seng Index continued to move higher Wednesday, last up 0.6%, while the Shanghai Composite was 0.3% higher.
Stocks in Indonesia rose 0.8% after Joko Widodo was declared winner of the country's presidential election. Expectations for a win by the candidate considered to be pro-business have supported the benchmark Jakarta Stock Exchange Composite for much of 2014, with gains of 19.9% year to date.
Overnight, U.S. stocks rose on better-than-expected earnings as well as on upbeat inflation and home sales numbers.
The Dow 30 fell 0.41%, the S&P 500 index rose 0.50%, while the NASDAQ Composite index rose 0.71%.
The Labor Department reported earlier that the U.S. consumer price index rose 2.1% in June, unchanged from the previous month and in line with forecasts.
On a month-over-month basis, U.S. consumer prices were up 0.3% after a 0.4% increase in May, also in line with expectations.
June's core inflation rate, which excludes food and energy costs, rose by 0.1% from May and 1.9% on year, slightly below market calls for 0.2% and 2.0% readings, respectively, which illustrated how gasoline was driving the CPI up, though markets viewed the numbers as fundamentally healthy anyway.
Elsewhere, the National Association of Realtors reported earlier that existing U.S. home sales rose 2.6% to 5.04 million units in June from 4.91 million in May, beating market forecasts for a 2.0% rise to 4.97 million units.