Asia
China’s stock market continued to retreat after a strong start to the week, but losses were modest day on day. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was fractionally higher on Thursday’s close. India’s Bombay Sensex was one of the better performing markets in the wider region. The Japanese yen’s recovery against the US dollar continues to hold back gains on the Nikkei and Topix indices, which inched forward by around 0.5% on the day.
Europe
After Super Thursday’s bumper crop of results, today sees the release of updates from Reckitt Benckiser (RB) and BT (BT.A), which were positively received by the stock market. Both companies are rated as four star by Morningstar, which means that analysts believe the stock is undervalued.
In mid-morning trading the FTSE 100 was just below 7,700 points, but sterling’s strength seemed to be holding back gains.
Spain’s Ibex was the best performing in the eurozone, while France’s CAC 40 held up despite the country’s GDP coming in lower than expected.
North America
Facebook’s (FB) near-20% decline yesterday, the biggest one-day fall in market value in history, continues to dominate the headlines. But Facebook’s share price woes have been an outlier in an otherwise golden period for the other FANGs. Amazon (AMZN) is a case in point, with an over 1,000% increase in earnings per share (EPS) year on year. Apple (AAPL) reports next Wednesday and the race is on for the world’s first trillion dollar company. Apple is not far off with the shares pushing to record highs just below $200 a share in recent months after an indifferent start to 2018.
This week has been about earnings but the US economy comes back into focus today with the latest GDP figures. The economic growth is expected to be much stronger than the second quarter of 2017.
Still, when the Federal Reserve meets next week, it is still expected to keep interest rates on hold. After next week’s meeting there are three meetings before the end of the year, but will the Fed make one or two more quarter point rate hikes?