Last week’s relief rally on Wall Street stalled on Friday ahead of the weekend’s US-Iran talks in Pakistan.<\/p>\n
While key US indices enjoyed their best week since November, the final session saw the S&P 500 making a marginal loss, the blue-chip Dow down more, while the tech centric Nasdaq made a gain.<\/p>\n
S&P 500: -0.1%Dow Jones: -0.6%Nasdaq: +0.4%<\/p>\n
European stocks did better with the pan-Europe Eurostoxx 600 up 0.4% despite Germany’s Dax trading sideways.<\/p>\n
Over the week, the S&P 500 gained 3.6%, European stocks picked up 3.6%.<\/p>\n
Australian and Chinese shares did even better, up 4.4%, but both were outpaced by the more than 7% gain in Japan.<\/p>\n
ASX 200 futures closed on Saturday morning pointing to another solid 0.8% gain, although that was before the talks in Pakistan collapsed.<\/p>\n
Chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, Mark Haefele says investor sentiment continues to fluctuate amid uncertainty about the durability of the two-week Middle East ceasefire agreement.<\/p>\n
“While volatility is likely to remain in the near term, we continue to believe that exposure to structural trends will remain a key differentiator for equity market performance over the long run,” Mr Haefele said.<\/p>\n
Oil prices on futures markets slipped but remain at historically high levels on the physical spot markets.<\/p>\n
Brent crude futures: -0.8% to $US95.20\/barrelWest Texas Intermediate crude futures: -1.3% to $US96.57<\/p>\n
Both key futures contracts fell around 13% over the week.<\/p>\n
“The key issue for the oil market is whether ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz will resume,” Commerzbank analysts said in a weekend note.<\/p>\n
“So far, there are no signs of this happening. If oil supplies from the Persian Gulf remain blocked, oil prices are likely to rise again.”<\/p>\n
Traffic through the strait remained less than 10% of normal volumes as Tehran warned ships to keep to its territorial waters.<\/p>\n
Most ships that have sailed through the Strait in the past day were linked to Iran, ship-tracking data showed on Friday.<\/p>\n
US inflation data showing a 0.9% jump in the CPI reading for March, taking the year-on-year figure up to 3.3%, saw US Treasury yields edge higher.<\/p>\n
Despite that, the US dollar slipped, with the Greenback having its worst week since the start of the year.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Australian dollar has been a beneficiary of the trade gaining around 3% over the week, despite a marginal dip on Friday.<\/p>\n
In early trade this morning, the risk sensitive Aussie has dropped almost 1% to be trading back below 70 US cents.<\/p>\n
Another indicator of anxiety ratcheting up in global markets has been the rapid retreat of cryptocurrencies after the peace talk failed.<\/p>\n
Bitcoin slipped around 3% to be trading just above $US71,000.<\/p>\n
Gold lost a bit of ground (-0.3%) on Friday but picked up 2% over the week.<\/p>\n
Copper hit a three-week high but eased a little on Friday’s close as traders juggled the competing forces of an improved demand in China against uncertainty over the fragile ceasefire in the middle east.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week’s relief rally on Wall Street stalled on Friday ahead of the weekend’s US-Iran talks in Pakistan.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2001,64,63,166,2009,99,2003,2005,160,2010,171,2007,2006,2008,2002,2004,1491],"class_list":{"0":"post-602942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-asx","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-australian-dollar","12":"tag-bitcoin","13":"tag-business","14":"tag-dollar","15":"tag-dow-jones","16":"tag-live-blog","17":"tag-live-update","18":"tag-markets","19":"tag-nasdaq","20":"tag-nyse","21":"tag-sp","22":"tag-share-market","23":"tag-stocks","24":"tag-wall-street"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}