Weekly Market Summary

By Raymond Chatlani

To summarise, two weeks ago markets tanked and last week they rallied. This week they went down again. We can expect this directionless occurence to happen throughout the summer with risk higher to the downside. Also, the rally that we saw last week was on the lowest volume of stocks bought in any one week this year.

After positive earnings at the start of the week from Alcoa and Intel, Investors were disappointed with results from JP Morgan Chase who has a very cautious outlook on the economy and Google that reported second quarter earnings that missed analysts' projections. Although financial results from Citigroup and Bank of America exceeded analysts' expectations, the market was disappointed that these banks' figures showed that their loan business revenue did not grow over the quarter. Also, for the first time in 12 months, US manufacturing output fell in June.

This week BP managed to stop its Gulf of Mexico oil leak, so their share price is up but this good news has not stopped the indices from dropping this week. China reported second quarter GDP growth of 10.3 percent lower than the 11.9 percent growth reported in the first quarter as China pared down its stimulus spending and reined in its red-hot property prices. The US Federal Reserve policy makers were increasingly cautious on the US economic outlook and stated that risks to the downside were rising and warned that lost jobs will be harder to regain than expected. Investors were nervous on concern that the global economic recovery is losing steam.

This fight between the bulls and the bears looks like it may take some time to be resolved and we will have to continue to wait and see if an opportunity presents itself to go back into the markets in the next few months