Highlights
In like a lamb, out like a lion. A phrase that befits the past week’s stock market movements. The holiday-shortened week started well enough, with the S&P 500 index having two record closes on Tuesday and Wednesday as the markets continued to shrug off tariff worries and the lack of any curveballs from the Federal Reserve’s FOMC minutes. The market went on to give back all the weekly gains by the close of the week after Walmart’s full year forecasts came in short of analysts’ expectations on Thursday and the consumer sentiment index data on Friday added to the gloom, coming in lower than expected. The S&P ultimately ended the week about 1.7% lower while the tech heavy Nasdaq ended 2.3% lower for the week. However, it is still worthy of note that even with the unexciting end to the week, The S&P 500 is still well up over 2% for the year so far.
Data Highlights:
In January, Canada’s CPI results were 1.9% a rise by 0.1%, which matched analysts’ expectations. In Europe, The United Kingdom employment rate remained unchanged at 4.4% which defied expectations of a negative rise to 4.5%. UK CPI inflation fell to -0.1% in January from +0.3% in December. U.K retail sales increased to 1.7%. Over in Asia, Japanese GDP rose by 0.3% in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter, while the CPI rose to 3.2% year on year against analyst projection of 3.1%. In Australia, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) reduced the interest rate to 4.1%, in-line with market expectations. Australia’s unemployment rate changed to 4.1% marking a slight 0.1% increase.
Week Ahead:
Eurozone CPI – Monday | Australia Monthly CPI – Wednesday | U.S Initial Jobless Claims, GDP growth rate – Thursday | Eurozone Retail Sales, Unemployment rate & Inflation rate, Canada GDP growth rate – Friday.
