Week ending 30/08/24 - Digesting news from Jackson Hole

The Market Call

This week’s Market Call sees Jeremy and Gareth talk mainly macro - there was very little UK stock news, but a lot going on more broadly.

Markets have had a few days to digest the comments from US Fed Chairman Jay Powell, who last week steered towards lower US rates at the Jackson Hole gathering of central bankers. The fear might have been that this could prompt new worries over the US-Japan carry trade, but so far, both debt and equity markets have been stable...essentially saying "OK, we were expecting this....now please deliver the soft landing with lower rates and stable, low inflation". The US dollar continues to slowly weaken, useful for most non-US nations.

The big corporate news of the week was the much-awaited Q2 results for NVIDIA - a doubling of revenue to $30bn (!), uplift to next-quarter guidance and a $50bn (!) share buyback all looked good, but weren't enough to stop the shares tumbling 7%. We discuss whether this means a cooling of appetite for the "Magnificent Seven" tech titans, or investor concern over the wall of spending - much of which is the others in the Mag Seven buying chips from NVIDIA...we ask whether investor worry over what could be a "winner takes all" game could bring more scrutiny on future investments.

One bright side from this shift in attitude might be that smaller (and non-US) stocks could get more attention from big investors - and once again, the UK would be very well placed to benefit.

Next week is mainly about jobs - some big US jobs data points which, although volatile and hard to predict, will hopefully show that the US economy is robust but not overheating...anything other than that would make it tricky for Jay Powell to engineer the much-anticipated soft landing.

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