Weekly Market Summary.

US/China trade talks continued to dominate global equity market sentiment. The week started positively after it was signalled that the US and China were edging towards an initial trade agreement (phase 1), following constructive discussions between China’s Vice-Premier Liu He, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Positive news flow from US-China trade talks resulted in another positive week for global equity markets.

This week, central banks and politicians delivered few surprises allowing global equity markets to take direction from economic data and corporate results.

Global equities ended the week higher thanks to better than expected corporate results which highlighted that companies are weathering the slowing economic growth and trade dispute.

It felt like this day would never come, but Brexit may finally be here! However, everything depends on the outcome of tomorrow’s (Saturday 19 October 2019) Parliamentary session when MPs vote on the deal.

Sentiment going into this week’s US/China trade talks was negative after the US placed eight Chinese technology companies on a US blacklist and China stopped NBA (basketball) broadcasts.

Global equity markets declined at the start of the week after US ISM manufacturing PMI came in at 47.8 in September.

While it has been an interesting week watching the latest political turmoil unfold in both the UK and US, it should be noted that this is just a sideshow as the main driver for markets is still the US/China trade talks (as this impacts global economic growth and corporate profitability).

Oil was of course the main focus at the start of the week after last Sunday’s (15 September 2019) drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities which took out half of their oil production (roughly 5.7m barrels a day), which is around 5% of the total daily global supply.