Just twelve short months ago, market sentiment was dominated by ‘tapering’. Bonds were being aggressively re-priced as investors raced to translate the latest comments from Ben Bernanke into a forecast for the 30-year rate of return on US sovereign debt; and equities were widely perceived as being the superior investment… Read the article
Month: October 2014
What panic? Consumers haven’t felt this good since pre-Lehman crisis
Every week we sit down as a team to look at a summary of the economic data releases from across the world over the past seven days. We try to decipher what, if anything at all, those little green and red numbers tell us about the nature of the global… Read the article
A test of temperament
Have you changed your views in the last two weeks? Are you more or less confident in what you previously believed?
Price action is a powerful force; it can reinforce beliefs (confirmation bias) or leave you badly shaken. We know that short term price action can be little… Read the article
No reason to blur our own convictions with IMF forecasting noise
To use Nate Silver’s terminology (in his insightful book highlighted by our colleagues over at Bond Vigilantes recently), this week has seen plenty of ‘noise’ (subjective commentary) for very little ‘signal’ (objective data).
In the signal-lull between last week’s flurry of economic data releases (for example, on US… Read the article
Hong Kong protests weigh on Asian stockmarkets
Recent pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong seem to have impacted investor sentiment across much of Asia. While there are other factors also responsible – such as some sluggish data on Chinese manufacturing activity – fears over escalating political unrest have contributed to rapid declines in several Asian stockmarkets.
Unsurprisingly, the… Read the article
US Stock and US Profits – A pause for thought ahead of the Q3 reporting season
With the third quarter results season just about to get started in the US, the market will be focussed on the profits story in the coming weeks. Having rallied by over 7% already this year after an impressive nearly 30% price rise in 2013, there are some commentators who are… Read the article