Stocks pullback after recent gains; US500 prints death cross

Summary:

• Indices trade lower as US500 prints death cross

• German carmakers under pressure once again

• Precious metals build on recent gains

• Bitcoin rises after recent declines

• Top 3 charts of the week: GBPUSD, UK100 and Copper

There’s been a further pullback seen in stock indices today with the US500 falling below Mondays low and trading not far above the closing price seen last week. The market appears to remain fairly well supported but a well known signal that is widely seen amongst it proponents for predicting doom and gloom in the stock markets has occurred today with the US500 printing a “death cross”. As you would expect from a technical signal given the moniker of “death cross” this is widely seen as a negative event, but looking at previous instances when this occurred it hasn’t actually been the case.

The DE30 has pretty much erased all of the gains seen so far this week with the German car industry is taking a step back today. There are two main reasons behind this. The first one are words of the Chinese officials regarding scrapping tariffs on the US car imports. Chinese authorities poured cold water onto investors’ heads saying that they are mulling removing tariffs. This is important as earlier news suggested that the decision to remove levies was already made. Apart from that, German and the US officials said that scheduled meeting of the German car maker CEOs with Trump administration is not going to be about car tariffs. BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen are all trading lower today. Continental also can be found under pressure following a downgrade received at Jefferies.

There’s been steady gains for both Gold and Silver in recent trade with the precious metals benefitting from a slide in the greenback. The price of Gold has moved up to its highest level since October and has revisited the prior resistance zone from 1237-1244. This region capped the advance seen in early October and could now be seen as a key level to watch going forward. Silver oftens exhibits a close relationship to Gold, and we’ve also seen some gains here this week with the market currently trading higher by more than 1.5%.  

There’s been some small gains seen in Bitcoin today after the recent rout with the market higher by around 2% at the time of writing. However, some major coins have not seen similar optimism. EOS (EOS on xStation5) experienced huge sell-off today with price declining around 11%. The capitalization of the whole cryptocurrency market stands around the $130 billion mark. The Revenue Department of Thailand, a Thai government agency, is conducting a blockchain test to explore opportunities of implementing this technology in a fight against tax frauds, according to the Bangkok Post. Ekniti Nitithanprapas, a director-general of the mentioned agency, said that blockchain technology could help verify value-added taxes invoices, and subsequently it would root out fake ones.  

Our top 3 charts of the week are: GBPUSD, UK100 and Copper and can be viewed here.