Member Article

Jackon hole attention shifts to ECB this Thursday

Today was characterised by a modest risk on bias, with stocks across Europe generally seeing price appreciation, and commodities such as oil, gold and silver seeing 1% plus gains. Despite a fairly uninspiring Jackson Hole Summit of Central bankers in Wyoming over the weekend, markets were purportedly looking forward to the ECB’s meeting on Thursday, from which more evidence of central bank support is possibly anticipated (and certainly hoped for).

The buying, albeit in low volumes, was present despite weak manufacturing data out of Europe, in which the Italian, French and German manufacturing purchasing managers indices were all below previous readings, and worse than forecasts. This was in contrast to a surprise UK reading, with the British PMI rising to 49.5 in August, still showing a contraction but well above forecasts.

With US markets closed for Labour Day, the FTSE 100 finished up 0.65% at 5749. London listed blue-chip stocks were led higher predominantly by mining companies, with the precious metal miner Fresnillo gaining around 4%.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James .