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This has been one of the busiest weeks for potentially market moving information in a long time. We’ll start with market moves and see what that tells us about the way in which the information has added up, and what are currently...

This week has had lots of quite important information but no single aspect has dominated. Equity markets are higher again, bond yields are stable and companies tell us that, on balance, things are difficult but okay. US retail investors are choosing to...

Markets keep rising steadily and gently, on an incoming tide of liquidity. Investors appear to have plenty of cash and are happy to deploy it into risk assets, largely thanks to expectations of interest rate cuts. Both intraday and day-to-day stock market...

It felt like the first week of summer holidays. Stock market volatility dropped again – both in measured and implied terms – and the 9 July deadline on Donald Trump’s tariff moratorium was no deadline at all. The US president pushed back...

Sunshine and all-time highs this week. US stocks started their 4th of July holiday in fine spirits. Encouragingly, smaller and mid-cap American companies have outperformed the ‘Magnificent Seven’ tech stocks over the last fortnight, and were buoyed again by Thursday’s strong jobs...

What a week. No sooner had the US shocked the world by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities than President Trump declared a ceasefire and subsequent end of the Israel-Iran war. More astonishing still was that the Israeli and Iranian governments obeyed, albeit only...

We have, unsurprisingly, had a bit of a down week. The Israel-Iran war has pushed up oil prices about 4%, with a slight knock to equities. The ‘safe haven’ dollar has risen but only slightly, up 0.5% against a stable sterling. None...

This week’s political events did not disturb markets until Israel’s military action on Iran on Friday morning. Even then, the reactions were relatively muted. In the days prior, Brent crude oil rose from $66 per barrel to $70 but other markets showed...

This week, a number of the world’s stock markets edged closer to all-time highs. Thursday’s Musk-Trump spat weighed on Tesla shares, though, and therefore the US’ S&P 500 (and the ‘Magnificent Seven’ tech stocks in particular). Fortunately, other than entertaining the general...

Last week’s pullback proved to be just a blip in the impressive stock market recovery. On tariffs, markets were buoyed in the early part of the week by the notion of the so-called “TACO trade” (Trump Always Chickens Out) and then, on...

After weeks of unimpeded recovery, this week’s pull back in global stock prices was probably to be expected. The story that Trump is back on the tariff war-path with the EU, planning to impose 50% levies (possibly before the “90-day” deadline) has...

A good week for US stocks has erased the year’s losses in dollar terms (in sterling terms, they are mildly negative). The tech-heavy NASDAQ index is officially in a bullish trend – passing the 20% up mark from April’s trough. The recovery...

Despite the India-Pakistan hostilities, markets remained calm this week. Measured price volatility came down substantially although, due to global economic uncertainty, implied future volatility – the cost of insuring your assets against sudden losses – is still relatively high. But investors seem...

It ends as a pretty good week for global markets. That is despite dire US GDP figures, mixed earnings reports from the biggest US tech companies and, for us, disappointing news that a US-UK trade deal is unlikely to come soon. Investors...

Capital markets bounced this week and the mood notably improved. Media commentary put this down to Donald Trump’s softer rhetoric on Chinese tariffs, and his affirmation of the US central bank’s (the Federal Reserve’s) independence. Equities and bonds were positively impacted, not...

We head into the long Easter weekend with calmer markets than a week ago – but without any strong rebound. Time off from the tariff drama has helped the mood and eased last week’s liquidity concerns, but there still is not much...

After a week of eye-watering ups and downs, stock markets are roughly where they started but still well below where they were before Trump’s April 2nd ‘Liberation Day’. For bond holders, it has been equally volatile but prices are more than slightly...

Donald Trump’s tariffs upset markets, which were unprepared for their magnitude. The US imposed a 10% tariff on most imports, and additional “reciprocal” tariffs on major trading partners. Unsurprisingly, this was followed by China’s 34% retaliatory tariff this morning. Global stocks sold...

As most of us are aware, markets have recently been taking one step forward, one step back and this week was no different. Equity markets started with a bit of positivity amid talk that Trump’s April 2nd tariff “Liberation Day” was going...

Capital markets were calmer for most of the week, with a little turbulence into the end. Up until Thursday close, stock prices moved higher and measures of intraday volatility fell somewhat, largely thanks to fewer signs of policy upheaval from the US...