It took a while but the FTSE finally woke up this Monday, while the Dow Jones couldn’t decide which way to go after the bell rang on Wall Street.
Having spent the morning in a state of unmoving stubbornness, the FTSE become more receptive to the various factor working in its favour this Monday, chief among them sterling’s continued pullback from last week’s highs. With cable down 0.5%, and below $1.395 for the first time in 5 weeks, and the pound slipping 0.1% against the euro, leaving sterling straining to keep its head above €1.14, the FTSE was free to climb 30 or so points. That took the UK index within touching distance of 7400, a level it abandoned all the way back during the sour trading that plagued early February.
An indecisive Dow Jones found itself switching between green and red this Monday, the index’s investors unsure what to do with the dollar’s new found energy. Rising US bond yields, and their hawkish implications, have given the greenback a boot up the backside; the dollar jumped half a percent against both the pound and the euro, while against the Japanese yen it surged 0.8% to hit a near 10 week peak.
As for the eurozone indices, they were somewhere between their UK and US peers. The DAX, which was at moments this Monday down 80 points, returned to flatness as the afternoon went on; the CAC, on the other hand, took a bit more pleasure in the euro’s troubles against the dollar, the French index climbing 0.4%.
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