The world’s stock markets have been relatively quiet so far today, but the commodity and currency markets have grabbed the attention with some significant price moves. It all started earlier today when it was announced that the Bank of England considered increasing it’s quantitative easing plan to the maximum amount of £75bn.

This surprise news had a major impact on the currency markets and helped push both the GBP/USD and the EUR/USD pairs significantly higher. The GBP/USD started the day at around 1.5485 but is now over 300 points higher at 1.5793 whilst the EUR/USD is around 180 points higher at 1.3813.

The US dollar has had a fairly weak day all round because the USD/CAD, USD/CHF and USD/JPY pairs are all trading significantly lower.

Onto commodities now and both the gold price and the oil price have continued to trade higher today. The price of gold is nearly $11 higher at $938.50 and the crude oil price is now trading comfortably above the $60 level at $61.97.

As I’ve already mentioned, the stock markets have had a fairly uneventful day today. In Europe the FTSE 100 finished down 13.84 points at 4468.41 whilst the CAC 40 and DAX fared slightly better closing the day 28.41 and 79.32 points higher at 3303.37 and 5038.94 respectively. In the US the Dow Jones is 27 points higher at 8502 whilst the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are 3 and 9 points higher at 912 and 1743 respectively with around an hour to go until the closing bell.

Looking ahead to tomorrow, there are bank holidays in much of Europe (although not the UK) but we can still look forward to UK retail sales and US unemployment data.

 

 

Filed under: Market News

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