Summary:

• Stock markets play down geopolitical risks

• Major cryptocurrencies decline today

• Semi-important data from the US to be released in the afternoon

The attack on Syria conducted by the US, UK and France did not meet with any significant response from the global stock markets. Majority of European benchmarks remain in the vicinity of the Friday’s close. New Zealand dollar is the biggest underperformer from the Group-of-10 while the Swedish krone is on the rise. Precious metals decline along with energy commodities while industrial metals gain. Markets await for the US retail sales data that is scheduled for release in the early afternoon.

This will be another interesting week on the markets with geopolitics mixing up with a relatively intensive data calendar. On the geopolitical front markets seem to be relieved after a strike on Assad’s positions in Syria. Sure, military strike is not what markets want in the first place but in this case it was pretty evident that some kind of intervention needed to occur and the question was about repercussions.

Over the weekend the cryptocurrency market saw a surge in the valuations of many coins. The famous Bitcoin managed to climb back above $8000 mark moving as high as to the vicinity of $8400 handle on Sunday. On the other hand Ripple managed to test resistance level at $0.7 just to fall back to $0.62 afterwards.

Looking around financial markets one may notice that investors decisively shrugged off mounting geopolitical risks in Syria where air strikes took place over the weekend. Therefore, the ultimate fallout is likely to be contained, and then investors may put more emphasis on macroeconomic readings as well as a trade war thread anew. A modest response to the Syrian revelations is perfectly mirrored in the German DE30 which keeps trading within its bullish channel.

The Western allies including the United States, France and the United Kingdom decided to strike three targets in Syria in retaliation for a supposed deadly chemical attack carried out by the Syrian authorities against their own people in the city of Douma. In its official statement the Pentagon said that among targets there were three chemical weapons facilities.

The past two weeks were dominated by geopolitics – notably the Trade Wars and Syria. This may continue for a while but investors also need to pay attention to a present flow of economic reports. This flow will intensify this week with important reports from UK and US while the CAD traders will await the BoC decision.