Spreadex Market Update

Markets continue to see BoJ-inspired fall ahead of dreadful US GDP data; Facebook wins earnings season war with tripled Q1 profit




Now down nearly 1% the FTSE remains firmly under the 6300 mark, the month’s 2016 highs increasingly looking like a blip rather than a breakout. Even a strong performance form Brent Crude, the black stuff trading just above $47 per barrel, hasn’t helped the UK index shake off its BoJ and banking sector-inspired blues.

Teasing a recovery at points during the morning, the Eurozone indices have now gone the other way, the DAX and CAC plunging by 1% and 1.2% respectively. The general bearish tone of the markets has likely been exacerbated by the latest troublesome figures out of Spain, the country increasingly muscling in on Greece’s position as the region’s biggest disaster.

Turning to the US open and investors’ current bad mood looks unlikely to change, the Dow futures promising a near 140 point drop after the bell. If anything things may only get worse this afternoon, with analysts expecting a truly miserable showing from the US first quarter GDP reading. Growth is forecast to have halved to 0.7% from the already dreadful 1.4% (at the annualised rate) seen in the final quarter of 2015. If accurate that would be the worst GDP reading in around a year, something that asks some pretty big questions about the viability of the Dow Jones maintaining its recent recovery.

Bucking the tech trend set by Alphabet, Apple and Twitter, Facebook soared over 9% to fresh all-time highs last night off the back of a stellar set of first quarter figures. The headlines were made as the social media giant reported its profit had tripled to $1.51 billion having added nearly $2 billion in revenue year-on-year to $5.4 billion. Most importantly user growth remained robust, jumping 15% to 1.65 billion on the monthly metric, with daily mobile users (increasing the company’s bread and butter) approaching 1 billion for the first time.


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