U.S. Federal Reserve officials signaling a 75-basis point interest rate increase at their July 26-27 meeting, rather than the 100 bps some were pencilling in, markets are in a relatively cheerful mood. Investors are also turning their attention this week to Thursday's ECB meeting, which is supposed to deliver its first interest rate hike in more than a decade.

- The ECB's expected move of 25 basis points is small compared to the size of recent interest rate increases by its counterparts elsewhere. Canada raised interest rates by 100 basis points, and even Switzerland may consider raising interest rates by 50 basis points in September.

Equities:

In Wall Street, investors were relieved last Friday, with S&P 500 futures up 0.4%, and Nasdaq futures up 0.7%, but the performance of U.S. indices is still under negative pressure.

- Earnings reports from some organizations and companies will be published this week including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, IBM International Business, Netflix Inc., Tesla Inc., and Twitter Inc.

- MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan added 1.4%, having shed 3.5% last week. Japan's Nikkei was closed for a holiday, but futures traded at 27,130 compared to a cash close of 26,788. EUROSTOXX 50 futures rose 0.6% and FTSE futures 0.4%.

- The overall environment with high inflation and returns and the tightening of central banks, coupled with global geopolitical uncertainty, these components of the current environment are pushing markets to clearly warn against higher-risk assets.

Currency Market:

- Safe haven currencies performed well last weekend, and the dollar index continued near a two-decade high above 109 points. Swiss franc recorded strong rises and was the most profitable major currency by up to 1.85%, taking advantage of several market developments, mainly weak risk appetite due to fears of a global economic recession.

- In second place on the list of most profitable currencies last Friday comes the Euro by up to 1.84%, where it benefited from the statements of decision makers within the European Central Bank about raising interest rates during the bank's upcoming meeting this week.

- Although the Canadian dollar benefited from higher oil prices, it came at the bottom of the list of most lucrative currencies last weekend.

Commodities: Gold

- The precious metal recorded its fifth consecutive weekly loss and fell to $1,697.45 an ounce, driven by the dollar's loss of momentum amid profit-taking from high positions above 109 points.

- Gold lost strength against U.S. dollar last week, but appears to be trying to form temporary support above level of $1,700 an ounce, but shows no signs of a clear long momentum after its limited recovery around $1,745.

Commodities: Oil

- Oil prices are trying to resume their bullish trend following a recent downward correction.

- However, supply problems remain, and the rapid need to fill the demand gap provides support for oil.

- Last week, the WTI fell 6.87% to $97.59, while Brent crude fell 5.80% to $100.79 a barrel.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
For more articles click here