Market update

In this month’s update we will take a closer look at Chinese stimulus, it’s expected economic effectiveness and ongoing market impacts, along with the impact of these initial US rate cuts on markets.

In last month’s Investment Market Update we spoke about the market volatility seen in early August. Since then, global equity markets have broadly recovered, although worries remain over both the health of the US labour market going forward and the ability of the largest technology companies to deliver on the promised profits of their AI investments.

August has started with some volatility in investment markets with a number of causes and effects which we will go into in this update. As always, we stress that the recent activity reinforces the need for a portfolio that is diversified and that risk portfolios should be viewed as long term to reduce the impact of volatility.

In last month’s update we touched upon the French and British general elections, however at the time of writing the UK election hadn’t yet taken place and the French election had only passed its first round. Now that both elections have concluded we can take a deeper dive into market reactions.

This month's Investment Market Update looks at how markets have developed since last month’s update, reiterating the benefits of portfolio diversification. The drivers of the top 3 performing major equity indices are looked at in more detail and we discuss the recent and upcoming elections globally and the impact of these on markets.

In our Investment Market Update this month, we cover the following two themes: How April 2024 contrasted to Q1, leading to the benefits of diversification as well as the impact of the change in monetary policy expectations in April and how this drove returns.