In spite of the noise in global markets, it’s August – does anyone care? Investors celebrated the weaker-than-expected U.S. jobs report on Friday, rounding out a week in which both global stocks and bonds rallied. The U.S. jobs report pushed markets to price a higher probability that the Fed will hold rates steady in September and begin cutting later in the year, so stocks – especially more interest-rate sensitive stocks like small caps (e.g. the Russell 2000 index) – ra

U.S. stocks and bonds lost ground last week, with global stock markets all gaining ground. GOOG disappointed, which is hard to digest given their performance and outlook. Investors remained very concerned about A.I. investment needs, especially amongst the hyper-scalers. There are important central bank meetings and earnings this coming week.

Writing this weekly update is starting to get boring, because everything goes up every week, or so it seems. Having said that, one casualty this past week was gold, which finally seems to have come off the boil. The price of gold declined nearly 6% on Tuesday, and then stabilised but still ended down 1.8% on the week, the first weekly decline in the price of this safe haven precious metal since mid-August. All global equity indices were higher (yawn) on the week – most end