Summary:

  • European stock markets fall under pressure after yesterday’s sell-off on Wall Street

  • Bank of Japan remains reluctant to cryptocurrencies

  • UK manufacturing PMI reading beat forecasts

Yesterday’s sell-off on Wall Street set direction for Asian and European stock markets today. Among top laggards one can find the German DAX and the Swiss SMI. Norwegian krone is the strongest currency in the G10 basket while the Japanese yen and Swiss franc are the biggest underperformers. Gold trades subtly lower along with silver while oil prices rise ahead of weekly API report.

UK manufacturing PMI turned out to be better than expected showing a slight improvement compared to February. However, the details brought both positive and negative elements on balance the overall manufacturing sector in the United Kingdom kept its fairly decent momentum.

Bank of Japan has released a Q&A section concerning cryptocurrencies. The answers to the question does not seem to bode well for the crypto bulls as it looks like the Japanese central bankers still remain reluctant towards digital currencies. Among the questions we can find the one concerning the usefulness of the cryptocurrencies.

Wall Street began the new quarter on the back foot and therefore soured moods translated into the European stock markets. The start of trading across the old continent has been mediocre to the say the least with the German DE30 being the largest laggard.

The first trading day for US traders turned out to be painful as contained liquidity led to a heavy sell-off on Wall Street with the NASDAQ falling the most as tech stocks took a hit again. The technological index dropped 2.75% being fuelled by Amazon, Tesla or Microsoft as those firms took centre stage from retaliatory trade steps implemented by China during the weekend.

As European PMIs have already been released a sole reading worth watching left in today’s calendar is API weekly report on oil inventories. Commodity traders may want to watch this data carefully as it may give them a hint ahead of the government report scheduled for release later this week.