Market Updates.

Yesterday’s upbeat mood in global equity markets has continued into today on signs that the spread of the coronavirus is slowing.

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefit rose by a record 6.65m last week. This, together with last week’s 3.31m claims, means that nearly 10m Americans have lost their jobs in the past two weeks

As we mentioned yesterday, April started in a similar way to those horrible March days, as the Dow Jones had another near 1,000 point down day, falling 4.44%, after officials said the US could see as many as 240,000 coronavirus deaths.

A miserable month (and first quarter of 2020) is thankfully finally over. Global equity markets had been relatively stable for the first seven weeks of the year, but that all changed towards the end of February when the coronavirus outbreak started to spread across the world and economies were effectively shut down wherever it appeared.

UK equities turned around after we updated you yesterday to end the day up nearly 1% at 5,563.

Yesterday (Thursday 26 March 2020), global equity markets shrugged off the poor US jobless claims data and instead focused on benefits of the US economic stimulus package.

Market optimism was sustained for a second consecutive day yesterday (Wednesday 25 March 2020), thanks to the fact that the US Senate unanimously approved the $2tr fiscal stimulus package

Sentiment improved yesterday as the Democrats reached an agreement with Donald Trump on a $2tr fiscal stimulus package to help the US economy (the world’s largest economy), get through the coronavirus outbreak.

Global equity markets fell again yesterday (Monday 23 March 2020) after Democrats again blocked Donald Trump’s proposed US stimulus plan.

The latest policy announcements from around the world has calmed markets and allowed some of the recent indiscriminate sell-off to be reversed. Today (20 March 2020), as we write, the FTSE-100 is up 150 points at 5302.