Wednesday was a very skittish and haphazard day with regards to policy decisions and high impact news events. The strangest story came by way of the ECB and the various mandarins and apparatchiks hovering at the heart of its mechanism. It was incredibly hard to keep track of the mutterings coming from so many directions. […]
A tale of two central banks’ indecision and flops Read More »
All things considered the new Federal Reserve chairperson Janet Yellen made a very impressive ‘debut’ on Tuesday, she quickly ‘moved through the gears’ covering many subjects expertly. A brief synopsis of her speech we’ve contained in our usual snippets sections below. However, what really caught our eye was her frank honesty that the unemployment situation
The afternoon session in New York and London on Monday was both light on volatility and high impact news events. Canada’s annualised housing starts at approx. 195,000 units came in as analysts expected, thereafter a deputy governor of the Canadian central bank issued a decree that the banks aim was to keep inflation at circa
Both the UK’s and Europe’s central bank decided to keep their base interest rates at record lows on Thursday, the ECB’s decision not to lower and the accompanying narrative courtesy of the bank President Mario Draghi, caused the euro to power through R1 and many European indices to rally in correlation. In other positive news
Just as the UK appeared to be clawing itself slowly from a deep recession, fresh data, delivered on what appears to be a daily basis, is throwing into question the accepted wisdom that the UK is straining at the leash to leave its recent darker days behind. The latest concern, which didn’t flag up as
After it’s circa 325 points sell off on Monday the DJIA settled to close up 0.47% on the day on Tuesday. Still below the critical handle of 15,500 which (with hindsight) very few analysts expected to be breached within a week of the USA FOMC’s taper being increased, albeit by only $65 billion when the
It’s been a while since we experienced a significant sell off and risk off trading environment across many securities and indices. Monday’s trading sessions proved that the combination of; weak Chinese data, poor USA data and the looming debt crisis, was enough to send many investors to rush for the safe haven of precious metals…
There was plenty of negative economic data circulating in the USA on Thursday, however, despite a raft of poor prints the main indices in the USA defied the data and rose strongly throughout the day. Even poor earnings reports from Google and Amazon only caused a slight ‘wobble’ on the markets, just as the market
There was something entirely predictable with regards to the ending of the FOMC meeting and the announcement that the Fed is cutting monetary easing by $65 bn, ten billion less than previously. Firstly, it met the expectations of the majority of the economists polled by Reuters and Bloomberg. Secondly, the markets reacted as predicted with
The USA dominated the financial news on Tuesday, starting with durable goods orders which came in down -4.3% for December, after a 2.6% rise in November. Now despite missing expectations (by some margin) and many analysts being shocked, if we take a cursory look at the prints throughout 2013 we can clearly see falls of
