The original Mifid directive May 24, 2011 THE original Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid) was drafted in 2004 and implemented 4 years ago. The directive is up for review. So what were the shortcomings of the original European Commission directive? One of the core tenets of the original review was to shore up protection for clients that were classed as sophisticated, [...]
Fresh Eurozone debt fears see FTSE plunge to two-month low May 23, 2011 RENEWED concerns about the Eurozone debt crisis triggered a steep sell-off of Britain’s top shares yesterday, led by commodity stocks, with some analysts and investors seeing little on the horizon to tempt investors back into the market. The FTSE 100 index ended at its lowest closing level since 23 March, off 112.60 points, or 1.9 [...]
Doubts over factory growth hit Wall St May 23, 2011 US stocks closed at their lowest levels in a month yesterday in a sign of increasing doubt that equity markets can weather recent weakness in global manufacturing and demand. Industrial, energy and technology stocks, closely related to growth, were among the day’s top decliners. Poor manufacturing figures from Germany and China were a surprise and [...]
Don’t get taken for a ride on Elliott’s Waves May 23, 2011 IN 1938, the former accountant Ralph Nelson Elliott wrote The Wave Principle. A year later, the magazine Financial World commissioned a series of articles, which spread his message to a wider audience. It was an idea with huge implications for predicting market movements, based on the premise that “because man is subject to rhythmical procedure, [...]
DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN AS QE2 ENDS May 23, 2011 A LITTLE over a year ago, Greece was in the headlines as the parlous state of its public finances became apparent. At the same time, the US Federal Reserve was planning an exit strategy from its first round of quantitative easing (QE), and there was a major volcanic eruption in Iceland. As the speculation grew [...]
QE2: one is not amused by the potential for US equity downturn May 23, 2011 THE sheer size of the numbers involved in the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program (QE2) can be difficult to comprehend. By comparison, Queen Elizabeth II receives a paltry £7.9m per annum from the Civil List. This is nothing compared to the $600bn of US Treasuries bought by the Federal Reserve during this cycle of quantitative [...]
THE TIPSTER May 23, 2011 WITH another ash cloud looming, attention will inevitably turn to the airline sector that saw such high levels of disruption back in April 2010, when major airlines saw their profits take a battering on the back of long periods of aircraft down-time and general flight disruption. Admittedly, authorities know what they’re dealing with this time, [...]
Blue chips likely to dip over Greek debt May 22, 2011 A cautious mood is set to prevail in the markets this morning, with anxiety over the on-going Greece debt crisis and crucial upcoming economic data likely to dominate traders’ mindsets. In out-of-hours trading, GFT is forecasting the UK index to open down 16 points from last week’s close, at around 5,932. The German DAX is [...]
WALL STREET WEEK AHEAD May 22, 2011 Signs of a Wall Street sell-off are all over the place, but US stocks might well survive another week relatively unscathed if investors keep betting on sectors less vulnerable to an economic downturn. Pressure for a correction in the stock market has been building up in the past few weeks as the euro and oil [...]
Traders analyse #Twitter to predict market movements May 22, 2011 LAST week, Derwent Capital Markets launched the world’s first social-media-based hedge fund. The $40m fund will use Twitter to guide its investments, monitoring a selection of tweets to gauge market sentiment before making trades. Spread betters hearing this news will be pricking up their ears and thinking about how this could be applied to their [...]
