With the UK 100 set to end the week 200pts higher (+3.4%), now is a very good time to start thinking about one sector that’s hugely popular with traders and investors alike. Love them or loathe them, the UK’s blue chip banks regularly provide us with some of the juiciest trading opportunities – they’re liquid,…
Next week sees the key banking sector continue to update on how it fared in the last quarter of 2015. We’ve already had US and European majors tell us that things were tough (revenues flat, profits under pressure, regulation a burden) and some potentially overdone sector concerns (Negative interest rates, China slowdown, US recessionary risk,…
Shares in Coca-Cola HBC are top of the pile this morning, back testing 2016 highs as investors welcome a better than expected set of FY 2015 results as sustained underlying volume growth in Q4 helped deliver a positive result for the full year and put management in a position to hike its dividend by 11.1%….
Glencore stock remains in recovery mode today, making a bullish breakout beyond 6-month falling resistance at 100p. This comes from positive investor reaction to the miner being able to refinance a major loan facility early. An existing revolving credit facility (RCF) of $8.5bn is being replaced by a new $7.7bn facility which is good news, keeping…
Mario Draghi’s speech at the European Parliament is essentially an exercise in reassurance, because no one – not even the central banks – knows what’s going on at the moment. The market simply doesn’t stay in one place long enough to be prescribed the right treatment. So we must wait until March for genuine talk…
GBP/USD (‘Cable’) GBP/USD (15-min) GBP/USD (daily) Macro observations Dovish US Fed rhetoric still the main driver for USD strength Bank of England more likely to hike UK rates than cut them in 2016 (yet more likely it’ll do nothing) Technicals (based on daily price data unless otherwise stated) Trading around 7-yr lows Circa…