Lousy session in Europe weighed on Wall Street as NASDAQ losses 1.01 percent and other indices stays below a flat line. Earnings season is now in full swing in the US and tonight will see if Amazon can follow in the footsteps of tech giants Alphabet (parent company of Google) and Facebook in delivering impressive results. 

Let’s have a look at the European bourses which started the day with rather subdued moods. Deutsche Bourse (DB1.DE) reported yesterday that its consolidated net profit for Q2 declined to 176.3m EUR from 183.5m EUR in the prior year. In turn, EPS slipped from 0.98 EUR to 0.94 EUR seen last year. The stock slided 3.75 percent. 

The earnings season also hurt Deutsche Bank (DBK.DE) as well, as the company posted weaker than expected revenue for Q2. Net income for the three months ending in June rose to 466m EUR, well ahead of the street’s consensus of 273m EUR. What’s more, EBIT picked up to 822m EUR against a 547m EUR estimate. Deutsche Bank shares lost a staggering 6.48 percent today. 

In the currency sector, today’s dose of data from the US has failed to deliver a clear picture on the health of the US economy. The durable goods orders rose by 6.5% in month on month terms which was a marked beat on the +3.5% expected and also the prior reading of -0.8% (which itself was revised higher from -1.1%.) However the core reading showed only a 0.2% increase – below the +0.4% expected but the prior reading was revised higher from 0.1% to 0.3%. Overall this leaves a mildly positive feeling with both of these economic indicators residing towards the top of their recent range. Furthermore, both of these readings continue to rise and this means that they are now at the highest levels in year on year terms since 2014.

Swiss franc on another sell spree, currently down by 1.35 percent against the currency basket. The Swiss franc in recent days has been under a lot of pressure. Much of the CHF’s weakness comes from expectations of changes in monetary policy conducted by central banks in the Old Continent. One of the reasons for the weakness of the franc is the expected divergence between the monetary policy pursued by the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank. So far, both institutions have put a very high degree of monetary stimulus. But now the possibility of loosening stimulus on the part of the ECB that  Mario Draghi pointed out in June is far greater, and yesterday openly supported by Ewald Nowotny.

In the cryptocurrencies’ sphere, we’ve reported recently that a possible split scenario of Bitcoin has been already set aside, however the jury is still out as an ultimate deadline (31st July) is oncoming. The BTC price has moved up of late mainly on the back of a fading division’s risk, the digital currency has given back all but a half of its gains though. What could be even more striking, a new plan to split the virtual currency into two version on August 1 has emerged lately. This news has come in just days after the price’s rally on a solution designed to avoid such a split.