Weekly Market Summary.

This week, central banks and politicians delivered few surprises allowing global equity markets to take direction from economic data and corporate results.

Global equities ended the week higher thanks to better than expected corporate results which highlighted that companies are weathering the slowing economic growth and trade dispute.

It felt like this day would never come, but Brexit may finally be here! However, everything depends on the outcome of tomorrow’s (Saturday 19 October 2019) Parliamentary session when MPs vote on the deal.

Sentiment going into this week’s US/China trade talks was negative after the US placed eight Chinese technology companies on a US blacklist and China stopped NBA (basketball) broadcasts.

Global equity markets declined at the start of the week after US ISM manufacturing PMI came in at 47.8 in September.

While it has been an interesting week watching the latest political turmoil unfold in both the UK and US, it should be noted that this is just a sideshow as the main driver for markets is still the US/China trade talks (as this impacts global economic growth and corporate profitability).

Oil was of course the main focus at the start of the week after last Sunday’s (15 September 2019) drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities which took out half of their oil production (roughly 5.7m barrels a day), which is around 5% of the total daily global supply.

It was another positive week for global equity markets thanks to positive developments on US-China trade relations and monetary policy easing by the European Central Bank.

As summer draws to a close, it was back to work for a lot of people this week, including UK politicians! The political turmoil which followed resulted in a volatile week for Sterling, whilst global equity markets posted modest returns.

After a disappointing end to last week following an escalation in US/China trade tensions, global equity markets rallied strongly this week on hopes that there will be a truce thanks to positive comments from Donald Trump.