Market Talk — July 19, 2016

Some say the Nikkei is close to ending its bull run after seeing some impressive gains recently. However, after the long weekend we have seen yet another 1%+ gain, but that has yet to halt dealers still trying to call the top. A better performance than its peers as Shanghai and Hang Seng returned loses of -0.3% and -0.6% respectively. In late trading, the Nikkei has returned some of the cash gains whilst China 300 and HSI remain little changed.

Ahead of much data releases we heard that Moody’s downgraded their UK’s GDP growth target for 2016, and then, mid-morning, we saw the UK CPI release 0.5% marginally better than the 0.4% expected. However, despite a brief rally in GBP, it was only short-lived and we were back with the sellers very soon after. At 10 AM we had Eurozone ZEW Sentiment release a big miss on expectations of 9 we actually saw a -6.8 print; forward expectation is very pessimistic. Early afternoon, we heard that the IMF had, for the third time this year, downgraded its Global Growth estimate from 2016 and 2017. The initial estimate (in April) was for 3.2%, but today’s assessment is for 3.1% and for 3.4% in 2017. BREXIT a major concern says the IMF.

Turkey’s rate decision at noon saw 25bp cut. Moody’s put it on review for potential downgrade (already low) more importantly is portfolio flow out of the country. The big concern is the amount of Turkish corporations that borrow outside of their core currency, so this is something we shall comment on again soon. The Turkish lira lost 2.3% against the USD in today’s trading.

The US market was in comparison a reasonably quiet session with core indices closing little changed on the day. Another major focal point today was the DXY. Having recently broken the much-watched 200d, moving average dealers are baffled by the flow into the US markets.

Dealers were discussing that Morgan Stanley is calling for 10yr yield to be around 0.75% by year-end, which certainly helped sentiment, and the curve. 2/10 closed +86bp with 10’s the performer closing -3bp at 1.55%. German bunds were bid, but in quiet trade, despite DAX closing down 0.8%. Italy closed 1.23% (-2bp), Greece 7.71% (+4bp), Turkey 9.63% (+16bp), Portugal 3.05% (-5bp), and UK Gilts 0.795% (-2bp).