Morning Roll Call

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

Despite some extremely positive data from the USA, in the form of services PMI rising to a level not seen since September 2011, the USA markets refused to turn bullish and stayed on a downward trajectory, albeit the selloff was not as severe as experienced in the latter part of last week. The Markit flans

Fears of a China-led global slowdown and uninspiring U.S. data caused a selling frenzy on Wall St and throughout Europe on Thursday that ended with equities closing with their worst loss of the year. Major stock indices, such as the DJIA, closed down more than 1 percent in a sell off; the dollar fell, whilst

As the Davos World Economic Forum gets into full flow it’s tricky to keep up with the appearance schedule. Moreover, it’s increasingly difficult to understand why some ‘delegates’ and guest speakers are given so much air time. The legendary UK entrepreneur and founder of Virgin, Richard Branson, gave a speech suggesting that the “war on