Summary:

  • NASDAQ (US100 on xStation5) plunged almost 3% on Tuesday as tech stocks crashed
  • GBP continues bouncing back after The Times’ article on a post-Brexit hard border with Ireland
  • Oil moves down on a huge stocks build reported by API, soured moods across global equities

After a brief pullback on Monday the US stock markets came back to falls with tech stocks driving the sell-off. Consequently, the NASDAQ (US100) was afflicted the most losing roughly 3% while other indices closed the day somewhat higher – the SP500 (US500) went down 1.7% and the Dow Jones (US30) moved down 1.4%. There are some assumptions that severe declines in technology shared were steered by the simmering issue of Facebook as the company continues to face scrutiny over a customer data scandal. Yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg turned down a request by British lawmakers to appear in the Parliament but reportedly agreed to testify in the US. The stock ended Tuesday trading with a 4.9% decrease. Moving on, Tesla slumped over 8% following revelations that the National Safety Board is investigating a crash taking place last week and involving a Tesla car in California. And finally, Twitter proved to be the largest laggard tumbling as much as 12% in response to a Citron Research report (the company analyses stocks and provides informations to investors) suggesting that Twitter is vulnerable to a regulatory crackdown over its data privacy policies.

link do file download linkNASDAQ suffered on Tuesday following numerous adverse revelations concerning the most important stocks. Technically the index is closing a major 150DMA which has already served as a support twice so far. Expect that the ongoing bearish momentum could lead to a temporary breach of this line, however, a daily close should be conclusive. Source: xStation5

Asian investors refrained from buying riskier assets alike, and the selling wave is likely to spread over European markets too. The NIKKEI (JAP225) fell 2.3% while the Chinese indices are still trading and losing 2% (Hang Seng) and 1.3% (Shanghai Composite) respectively. We will provide more news with regard to stocks in our daily note about the German stock market.

On the currency front one may notice that the British pound has been one of the best major currency thus far gaining approximately 0.3% in the morning. Those gains are a response to the Times’ article saying that a solution to a post-Brexit hard border with Ireland is imminent. Do notice that the Times cited unnamed sourced hence relevance of those revelations could be dubious, but as always there may be a grain of truth.

link do file download linkThe GBPUSD visited its crucial support area and bounced off thereafter. The pair could continue rising toward 1.4280 where a more notable resistance line is localized. Source: xStation5

Along with falling stocks oil prices have taken a step back as well though there are more reasons standing behind such underperformance. Namely, US stocks increased by 5.3 million barrels in the week ended on 23 March easily beating the Reuters median estimate suggesting a mediocre 0.4 million barrels build. On the flip side, both gasoline and distillates inventories shrank by 5.8 and 2.25 million barrels respectively. The data needs to be corroborated by the governmental EIA report later today. At the time of writing WTI prices are trading 0.85% lower whereas Brent prices are sliding 0.7%.