Oil was blamed for the majority of today’s equity weakness but there was no new news and the reason was a little baffling! The Nikkei broke the 16k level and then fell another 300 points quite sharply. In late US trading, it lost an additional 150 points and is currently trading around the 15,500 level. […]

Fridays NFP in the US did not help support the Nikkei despite the DOW’s strong closing rally. We did see a bounce off of the 16k figure but given that the Chinese markets were closed, holding any gains on the day proved just too lonesome. Late news on Friday about oil production continues to haunt […]

Extremely poor data in Japan (Tankan est -0.7% actual -0.9% Previous +10.8) weighed heavily on stocks closing the Nikkei 3.55% lower and not a great start for the second quarter. Despite the better than expected Chinese Manufacturing report (49.7 versus an estimate of 48.2) it was not enough to turn sentiment around in Asia. It […]

Ptolemy I – 305-283 BC Ptolemaic Dynasty (367?-283 BC) As king of Egypt 305 – 283 BC General of Alexander The Great Founder of the Ptolemaic Dynasty Upon the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC at the age of 32, the newly created Greek Empire fragmented. No one general or heir was strong enough to […]

Asia followed the bullish tone provided by the Federal Reserve with a gap higher opening of around 1%. Mainland China and Hang Seng managed to build upon this enthusiasm, eventually closing up almost 2.5% each. The same could not be said of Japan when the Nikkei had problems holding the 17k psychological level. Tomorrow being […]

Most markets were undecided on which way to play ahead of today’s main event, and so moves were light and limited. Asia saw all core indices tussle between black and red, and with the exception of China all closed pretty much unchanged. Shanghai closed down 1.3% but that was after a late recovery rally at the […]

The Nikkei was the bright spot in Asian equity markets today closing up 0.8% whilst the JPY decline would have cost 0.3% of that gain. It was far better than the declines we saw in mainland China which closed -1.7%. Yuan gained small ground today and was last seen 6.5212. Given the majority of the […]

The weak close in the US followed through into the open for Asia and we saw prices gap lower across the board. The Nikkei did attempt to break higher around lunch but was short-livid being dragged down by oil, yet again! Both Shanghai and Hang Seng closed around 1.5% lower as increased talk of US […]

It is a sad state of affairs when, after a terrorist incident such as yesterday’s events in Belgium, how quickly the markets have accepted it and within a few hours priced out! This is both a reflection of what is becoming “a horrible accepted norm” and also the lack of market participants. Even though Asian […]

Hillary’s emails revealed that Google was involved in trying to overthrow Assad. Hillary was communicating with Google and asking them to assist in the region. WikiLeaks has published a searchable archive of Clinton’s emails. It now turns out that Hillary Clinton’s team and one of the company’s executives conspired to create a detailed plan for Google to get […]