At The Turn of ’23

Performance wise, we’ve seen the FTSE 100 lose around 1% of its value, the FTSE 250 is down by 4.5%, whilst across the Pond the Dow Jones and S&P are in a very different place, up by 3% and 15% respectively! (maybe that’s an unfair comparison though, as the S&P is pretty well governed by tech stocks, with 25% of the index weighting governed by just 7 tech companies).

In the FX market, sterling is up over 4% year to date against the dollar and about 3% versus the euro. The best performing currency globally is the Colombian peso, which is up 17.5% and at the other end of the spectrum, you’d be hard pushed to choose between the Turkish lira or the Argentinian peso, which have both shed about 30% of their value in the last six months – expand that timeline to five years though and Argentina is the bigger loser, having lost 90% of the currency’s value to the dollar, compared to Turkey at 80%.

There are a couple of good news points to draw your attention to: The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has said that car manufacturing volumes are up by 27% year on year. Lloyds business confidence survey has hit a 13 month high and in the US, GDP data has shown that the economy has managed to grow at about 2% this year, which is a positive sign that even if they do get a slowdown later this year and into next, the Fed might well have managed to engineer a ‘soft landing’.

Have a great weekend.