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Trading Ideas

$11,769,509,000,000 Reasons to Cheer 2020

(Bloomberg Opinion) — Traders and investors are tiptoeing nervously into 2020, after a stellar 2019 in which returns from almost every asset class outpaced their averages for the previous decade. The following charts illustrate why trading with cautious optimism might be the way to approach the coming year.THE TREND IS YOUR FRIENDBuying and holding anything from stocks to bonds to commodities proved to be a winning strategy this year.To be sure, those stock market returns are flattered by the slump in global equities in the fourth quarter of last year. But rumors of the death of the bull market have …read more […]

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Gold inches lower on trade cheer; focus on U.S. GDP data

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday the United States and China would sign their so-called ‘Phase one’ trade pact at the beginning of January, adding that it would not be subject to any renegotiation. U.S. gold futures were down 0.1% to $1,482.70 per ounce. “The real driver for gold markets has been trade war risk and with its de-escalation in phase one on the back of Mnuchin’s comments is not bullish for gold,” said Stephen Innes, a market strategist at AxiTrader. …read more […]

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U.K. Bank Ring Fence May Be Storing Up as Much Trouble as Brexit

(Bloomberg) — Britain took a step into uncharted territory this year, aiming to make its banks safer. But it might have just driven risk to places where it’s less manageable than before.The experiment — the result of an analysis of how the financial crisis damaged Britain’s economy — began Jan. 1. Big lenders were “ring-fenced”: retail deposit-taking was legally separated from riskier activities, primarily investment banking. Advocates compared ring-fencing to the U.S. Glass-Steagall act, passed after the 1929 crash.Britain’s big international players, Barclays Plc and HSBC Holdings Plc, are now barred from moving much of their domestic earnings into their …read more […]