City A.M. TV: Daily Market Snapshot (video)
It’s been a fascinating two weeks, initially building up to the Fed meeting (with the statement and updated ‘dot plots’ released on 17 March), and then dealing with the aftermath last week.
As is typical of forward looking markets, they rallied into the dovish Fed announcement, peaking just after the Q&A in the press conference. Since then, and up until Thursday last week, the S&P500 (and other key markets) gave back some of their prior gains.
Oil was a case in point, with three sharp down days on 18, 23 and 25 March. On Friday, though, and despite the forced liquidation of a major fund, US markets rallied notably in their final hour of trading, with the S&P500 closing at record highs. With that backdrop, coupled with the buy message of our short term market timing models, this should prove to be an interesting trading week in markets.
Whilst a shortened week for traders, given the Easter Friday holiday, there’s plenty of key macro data and events this week. In the US, the usual ‘start of the month’ data is published including ISM manufacturing (Thursday) and non-farm payrolls (Friday).
In the eurozone, inflation data is key along with final manufacturing PMI data (Thursday). That data is also released in Asia and the UK later this week. In addition in the UK there’s house price data (Nationwide, Wednesday), and business confidence data (Lloyds business barometer, Tuesday).