■ Hang Seng regains negative sentiment, losing 1.1% during week
■ Positive Greece momentum loses steam in Europe
■ u.s. markets grab investor attention on earnings season
■ Negative China sentiment weighs down on commodity prices
■ Gold prices decrease to lowest since 2010
Dragged down by weak data, most financial assets proved a rather bad investment last week. The Chinese stock market is responding less avidly to the government's stimuli with the Hang Seng losing a total of 1.1% during the week. Aside from the preceding week's gaining session, the Hang Seng decreased in all sessions during the last month and a half. Economic data from China have also been sub-optimal, with the preliminary June Caixin Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index dropping to a level of 48.2 points, from 49.4 last month.
Sobering from the Greek euphoria wasn't very easy for the European equity. The DAX lost a total of 2.8% during the week and the CAC 40 lost 1.3%. Europe too continues to exhibit weak macro data with the preliminary July Composite Purchasing Managers' Index for the Eurozone decreasing to 53.7 points from 54.2 in July.
On Friday the Fed published projections prepared by its Board staff as background for the June FOMC meeting, on the basis that these were mistakenly made public before. These projections have been rather dovish compared to the recent comments by Yellen, seeing the Fed funds rate increase to a mere 0.35% by the end of 2015, and stand at 1.26% in Q4 of 2016. The impact in the U.S. interest rates market has been quite evident, with the U.S. 2 year treasury yield losing about 0.02%, as they hover around 0.68%. Evidently, this didn't do much to aid the markets, as the S&P 500 ended the day by losing 1.1% and the Dow decreased by 0.9%. The U.S. session also gained some volatility from the earnings season. Apple served as a rather noteworthy mention in this aspect, with a weak report leading it to start Tuesday's session with more than a 5% drop. On a weekly perspective negative sentiment was rather evident in the U.S. as well, with the S&P500 losing 2.2%.
