Australian shares set to rise following gains on Wall Street

The news: The Australian sharemarket is poised to start higher, tracking overnight gains on Wall Street after a combination of falling bond yields and a less hawkish Federal Reserve reassured investors.

The numbers: The Dow Jones index rose 0.67%, the broader S&P 500 added 1.04%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq ended 1.64% higher. In the local market, ASX 200 futures were trading 52 points or 0.76% higher at 6896 points at 0700 AEDT on Thursday.

The context: Wall Street's major indexes closed higher after the US Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged and Fed Chair Jerome Powell said policy makers would proceed carefully although they were not yet confident financial conditions were restrictive enough to get inflation as low as the central bank would like. The market also got a boost from falling bond yields after the US Treasury Department said it would slow the pace of increases in its longer-dated debt auctions in the November-January quarter.

What they said: "He wasn't as assertive about higher-for-longer, as he has been in the past. That's one takeaway bulls will be focused on, even though he indicated the Fed still has a ways to go to get to its 2% target," Michael James, managing director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles told Reuters.