Dhe stockbroker is a shy deer. He doesn’t like change, doesn’t like uncertainty, and then prefers to withdraw into familiar territory – and that’s not the stock markets. This week there was another reason to dig back into the thicket. On the one hand, there are bad specifications from China. This is where the economic engine stutters. The country presented surprisingly weak economic data. Both consumer pleasure and industrial production decreased measurably in July. That is probably still due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Investors are now anticipating a global slowdown in growth momentum. HSBC analysts see a particular focus on Asian economies, where the virus is spreading due to the highly contagious Delta variant. American monetary policy is also causing uncertainty. According to the recently published minutes of the meeting, investors assume that the US Federal Reserve could act faster than expected. The bond purchases to support the economy could then be reduced in a timely manner as the labor market in the United States continues to recover.
This move could then be announced at their next interest rate meeting on September 21st and 22nd. This is one of the reasons why the dollar index, which measures the currency against other major currencies, climbed temporarily to its highest level since November according to the Fed minutes. The situation in Afghanistan does not exactly provide more security either. A humanitarian catastrophe is taking place there, but this, cynical as it is, has no bearing on the global economy. Nevertheless, there is one more uncertainty on the floor.
Nervous investors
How nervous investors are can even be measured quite rationally. For the Dax there is the so-called V-Dax New. This expresses the expected fluctuation range of the Dax. Option prices are used for the calculation. And the V-Dax New has risen sharply this week: While it was around 16 points at the end of last week, it rose to around 23 points by Friday afternoon – an increase of around 40 percent.
In this environment, the Dax has a weekly minus of around 1.5 percent to 15,716 points for this week. The recently jumped mark of 16,000 points is still within reach.
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