New school term has the US back at the top of the class Summer is officially over, but we are none the wiser regarding the direction of the economy. Or are we? Well, we quite likely are, but just a bit and not enough to know if next month’s equity markets will be...

Transcontinental growth divergence We don’t seem to be able to get away from writing about how bond yields have been driving equity markets due to their influence on underlying valuation dynamics. We wrote about it the previous week, on many occasions over the past...

Bonds are back Both equity and bond markets have had another rather difficult week and with it August has mostly erased the positive returns of July. From the medium-term perspective, UK-listed equities are nearly back down to the level at which we started the year....

Summer markets On the face of it, last week contained many of the news headlines that market optimists had been waiting for: rapidly falling US inflation and a cooling jobs market. In the UK, news that four of its major high street lenders were lowering mortgage rates...

Expect the unexpected July turned out to be another good month for portfolio investors as markets rose across the board, leaving only commodities and property investors in the red for the year. For more details on the month’s returns picture, please refer to our July...

Rate rises bouncing off ‘Teflon’ markets Equity markets continue to be buoyant after the rate rises in Europe and the US. Some market participants have been calling this the ‘Teflon market’ because nothing sticks to it. We would rather think of it as a sort of running...

Another inflation driver turns over Last week’s markets have, yet again, revolved around inflation, wages and profit margins. In the UK, we finally got a little of the good news that has been stoking US markets. Inflation wise, June turns out to have been not so bad....

Core inflation slowdown equals upbeat equity markets We wrote last week that markets had come to expect another round of significant interest rate rises from central banks, and that risk assets such as equities were likely to come under some pressure. At the end of...

Markets sour on news of resilient economy Last week we commented how the second quarter’s positive stock market returns were driven by a somewhat surprising improvement in investor sentiment. It’s surprising for several reasons. At the end of  March, fear was...

A glass half-full half year Halfway through 2023 and, all in all, things have been fair-to-middling for markets. We’ll have a more detailed run-through of asset class performances in next week’s Weekly, but an assessment of the changing economic and markets landscape...

Markets catching up with reality Following three weeks of ‘not a lot of news’ being good news for stock markets, bad news dented investor sentiment last week. This has coincided with some reversal of global liquidity, as the US government is once again stepping up...



Market conundrum amid volatile growth Last week saw equity markets move higher yet, despite central bank hawkishness. We had another 0.25% rate rise from the European Central Bank (ECB) and, although the US Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) left rates unchanged,...

Immaculate disinflation sentiment cheers investors Another positive week in global stock markets, which seemed unremarkable given it has been fairly good since the beginning of May. However, looking more closely – as we do – two market dynamics tell us more market...

Markets take good news in their stride Last week, we noted how the absence of specifically good news meant markets reacted more negatively than expected to the relatively low probability of a US debt default. We pointed out that the more notable event of the week had...

Debt ceiling angst or simply lack of good news? Compared to the previous week, markets did not really get much ‘new’ news to digest, and yet last week brought a renewed bout of equity market volatility. Given bond yields experienced even larger moves (up), ...

Big tech stocks increase is 'artificial' Last week we wrote that markets were facing growing risks. Since then, and at the time of writing, equity markets have generally headed higher. Japan has been enjoying a particularly good run with the Nikkei 225 making gains...

Trust the MPC to rain on May’s parade After a period where it felt like there was a shortage of news, things are hotting up. Both equity and bond markets are bearing up well generally but, in our estimation, underlying risks have increased since May started. After the...