February Market Commentary
Introduction
The story of the US/China trade dispute was a thread running through much of last year. Some progress was made in resolving the dispute at December’s G20 summit and that appeared to continue in January with China saying it is ‘ready to work’ with the US. Donald Trump confirmed this, describing a telephone conversation with Xi Jinping as leading to ‘big progress’.
Despite a rocky start over fears of a slowdown in China, this helped world stock markets to enjoy a good month, and we started the year with a clean sweep: all the markets on which we report were up in January, although many of them have a way to go to make up the ground they lost last year, with 2018 the worst year in a decade for global markets.