Weekly Market Summary.

This week global equity markets extended the previous week’s losses amid heightened coronavirus uncertainty.

With the global equity market volatility we have seen over the past three weeks, it isn’t surprising if you, like many of our clients, are worried – and I would like to reassure you that your portfolios are diversified across a variety of asset classes.

It has been a wild week for global equity markets. Equities initially rose sharply – the S&P 500 index, for example, rose 4.60% on Monday (2 March 2020) and 4.22% on Wednesday (4 March 2020).

As the coronavirus spread beyond Asia, the sell-off in equity markets did as well, with the FTSE-100 falling just over 11% during the week, while in the US, the Dow Jones fell over 12.36% and the S&P 500 nearly 11.5% – the most since 2008.

Apple this week warned that production and Chinese demand will miss its targets due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Most of the major equity markets extended last week’s rally, on hopes that the coronavirus outbreak is losing momentum.

Global equity markets rallied strongly this week on hopes that China is succeeding in containing the spread of the coronavirus and as a result the outbreak won’t significantly affect the global economy.

Rising fears about the economic impact of coronavirus hurt global equity markets this week. China’s equity market ended up being closed all week as the Lunar New Year holiday was extended because of the coronavirus – no doubt Monday (3 February 2020) could look ugly as they play catch-up.

Global equity markets fell this week on concerns China’s coronavirus could turn into a global pandemic and damage global growth.

It has been an important week for UK data. UK CPI inflation slowed again in December to 1.3% from 1.5% – its lowest rate since November 2016 and well below the BoE’s mandate which is to target inflation at 2%.