Summary:
- Stock indices have sold off into the European close after earlier moving higher
- Italian stocks regain post-election losses
- SEK depreciates on Riksbank’s comments
- Ripple completes round-trip on Coinbase rumours
- Active bank recommendations
Most of today’s European session was positive for stock indices with major bourses all moving higher and building on Monday’s gains. A spate of selling into the cash close is a little concerning however and it will be interesting to see how they react later on tonight. The US500 remains in a broader consolidation with the trading range tightening up in recent sessions.
The Italian FTSE MIB (ITA40) managed to pare its post-election loss. The automobile companies lead the gains of the Euro Stoxx 600 index while the real estate stocks were the sole underperformers in the morning. Following the outcome of the Italian general elections German MEP Henkel has made some interesting remarks in an interview yesterday. Henkel claims that the victory of the populist groups in Italy has paved the way for the further deterioration of competitiveness of the Italian industry and therefore may lead to increase of unemployment in the Italian economy.
The Swedish krona has found itself under renewed downward pressure following the newest remarks voiced by some Riksbank members including governor Ingves. During his speech in Stockholm Stefan Ingves said that the Riksbank expected low interest rates to last for some considerable time to come, mainly due to global real interest rates being lower than before. In his eyes it means that central banks all around the world hold less scope for using interest rate cuts to tackle future recessions.
Taking a closer look at the cryptocurrency block one may notice that Ripple, the third largest digital currency in terms of capitalization, has been the most volatile recently but even so volatility has remained contained taking into account digital currency standards. The prime reason for a Ripple’s whipsaw were talks or actually rumours about possible adding the virtual currency to Coinbase, one of the largest digital currency exchanges in the world localized in San Francisco.
Finally, the latest active recommendations from banks can be found here.