Markets Update: Stock Indexes & Bonds Rally Again, Metals Shine, Euro-Dollar Close to Parity

Hey everyone, and welcome to this video where we’re going to be talking about what happened in the markets over the last week.

Okay, so as always, we'll start with an analysis of the most important trends of the week. We can see that the main stock indexes performed as well this week as they did last week.

Indeed, the Mini S&P and the Mini Nasdaq futures rose in the last 5 days, so in the last 5 sessions, by about 4%. This recovery, however, was also the result of the Fomc's intervention, which decided to raise interest rates by 75 basis points, so by 0.75%.

We can see that the indexes in Europe also performed well. Even the Dax performed well, albeit weaker than the US indexes. The same applies to the Eurostoxx.

The bond futures also continue to recover. In particular, we’re talking about the US 30-year and 10-year bonds. And the German Bund futures showed even more positive results.

As for the energy futures, very positive performances for Heating Oil and Crude Oil. These two underlying assets rose by around 7% in the last week, while Natural Gas seems to have reached a standstill, and we'll have to wait and see if this is just a pause in its extremely positive and volatile 2022 trend, or if there will be a return to lower, more moderate prices.

As far as metals are concerned, Copper performed extremely well during the week. And here too we need to understand whether this was a turning point, a bottom, or whether it was simply a temporary adjustment in this recent downtrend. Silver performed even better by +8.3%. In just a few sessions, Silver had extremely positive returns, and here too we need to understand whether this bottom was indeed only a small adjustment, or whether it was a reversal point.

As far as the Meat market is concerned, we can see that the uptrend that took place last week on Lean Hogs has come to a slight halt. Indeed, it was up about 6.5%. And instead, here we can see that this week there was a timid downtrend on Live Cattle and a slightly more pronounced downtrend on Feeder Cattle. However, Feeder Cattle remains on average a rather volatile product, so this kind of variation of around -3% isn't particularly unusual for this product.

Turning to Soft commodities, we can certainly see a significant increase in the Orange Juice market. Apart from a very slight downturn in the Sugar market, the other products such as Coffee, Cotton and Cocoa performed positively, although Cocoa to a lesser extent than Cotton and Coffee.

As far as Grains are concerned, we can see positive increases across the board, regarding Wheat and all the Soy derivatives. The performance on these markets this week averaged between +8% and +12%, where indeed Soybeans experienced an excellent week of positive gains.

Moving on to currencies, there was a significant rise in the Yen and the British Pound. The Euro-Dollar was slightly closer to breakeven this week, remaining very close to two figures above breakeven against the US Dollar.

On to the cryptocurrency market, we only see Bitcoin in the chart at the moment. It seems to be continuing to recover and coming out of this small logjam at the moment. Interestingly, the uptrend continued this week as well, with a good performance of around 6.6%, which is still positive for the month, indeed it recovered 28.6% for the month. However, it's still quite far from the highs of the past and we don't know whether this recent positive performance is merely an adjustment or whether a significant bottom has been reached, meaning we can expect a rebound to higher levels.

If we look at the structure of volatility, we can see that it continues to be decreasing somewhat across all maturities. And the Vix index continued to fall, and indeed the latest quotations are around 22 points, which is by no means a particularly alarming value considering the levels reached in 2022.

As for rollovers, there is nothing to report this week. There were quite a few last week. So, with that, we can say that we've wrapped up our weekly analysis.

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