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Global stocks bumped up this week, recovering all of last week’s losses and then some. That is despite a US government shutdown that shows no sign of being quickly resolved. Previous funding gaps have hurt the world’s largest economy, but markets are...

Global stock prices have dropped this week, with most regional markets ending down. Some of this is end-of-quarter rebalancing of institutional portfolios. Institutional investors typically adjust their portfolios back to the original risk weights, a process which is equivalent to taking profits...

Rate cuts and record highs for markets this week. As wholly expected, the US Federal Reserve voted to decrease interest rates by 0.25 percentage points to 4% (the effective rate is about 4.1%), and signalled further cuts before the year end. The...

It has been another slightly confusing week for some investors. Markets mulled over last Friday’s weaker than expected US jobs report, but stocks kept climbing higher virtually everywhere. There were two big market action stories: a sizable fall in long-term government bond...

The ‘Back to School’ week often gets a lot of attention. Traders return from their holidays and reassess their market outlooks. So, after the summer’s strong equity rally, it is no surprise that investors are doing a bit of soul searching. There...

Markets have had another relatively quiet week. The news, on the other hand, was full of debt panic and more Trump destabilisation. As noted in the past few weeks, investors seem to have become desensitised to these events. The things traders typically...

The Bloomberg World stock market index has gained 0.5% for the week as we write, bond prices are mixed (UK yields are up). Underneath that, US large cap stocks did less well, while China and the UK have risen, to the point...

The good times keep coming for global stocks. This week, markets’ optimism was backed up by a fundamentally bullish outlook – the continued improvement of corporate earnings expectations in almost all major markets. And, with US interest rate cuts even more likely,...

After last Friday afternoon’s wobble, markets regained their footing this week. Global stocks mostly recovered and are back within touching distance of all-time highs. Investor sentiment was aided by the slew of US trade deals – either signed or pending. Amongst the...

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...