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MIDWEEK MARKETS + MEMES
Salaams y’all - It’s UneesaFinance here bringing you your weekly roundup of the week’s market moves.
With a whooping 47.5% of Muslim women in the UK with little to no understanding of investment instruments such as stocks, bonds and funds - it’s about time we learnt WTF is going on.
You can start by asking your family and friends to participate in this.
When you’ve gotta come up with alt passive income to protect your soft life
WELCOME TO YOUR MIDWEEK ROUNDUP
But first, let’s give you an overall view of April… (because it’s nice to have some background.)
April roundup:
On the whole, April held its own - we haven’t crashed into a global recession despite the market outlook giving Michael Scott energy:
Despite volatile market swings, the market ended the month with:
MSCI World Islamic Index up by 1%
DOW JONES Sukuk Index up by 1%
Gold is up by 10% year end to date
Global stocks are also up by 10%
Markets for May
Most market participants are trying to guess the USA Federal Reserve (the Fed AKA the US Federal Central Bank)’s next move.
Why?
As the age old saying goes, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. In essence, by following the Fed’s moves, you can gather an understanding of how the market may react, and adjust your portfolio or even risk level accordingly.
But in order to do that, we need to take a look at the data. This could be:
Unemployment stats
Inflation rate
Interest rate
Earnings results… to name a few!
Corporate earnings played a pivotal role in determining the likelihood of entering a recession. However, data indicated primary earnings weren’t as bad as initially thought - mainly because bigger financial institutions (think big investment banks) benefited from weaknesses amongst regional banks.
We also saw tech companies were a lot more resilient when met with declining demand and slower economic activity. Now, this isn’t the case across every industry - commodities have definitely suffered.
We may potentially be in a freight recession - meaning shipping and consumer spending is slowing down, but in the long-run what we can see is things aren’t as bad as the market had initially predicted, hence why we saw gains for the month.
The Fed also increased interest rates by 0.25% last month, though they’ve given themselves some wriggle room to act upon one of the two things below:
They analyse that the pace at which they’ve increased the rates over the last 18 months will hold the market together, and will hold out to analyse the market’s reaction on a granular level (what does this mean for the everyday person living in the US) OR
If inflation and unemployment were to rise again (they’ve stablised some what in the last month), they may take further interventionary action.
This is why the diversification of your portfolio is so important - beyond having exposure to different stocks across various industries, being exposed to different geographical markets and sectors is also very important.
E.g / Let’s take the UAE for example. In 2022, the UAE witnessed 11 initial public offerings (IPOs), raising Dh 51.2 billion. Demand reached Dh 1.454 trillion boosting the UAE’s financial positioning and global market attraction in an otherwise bleak IPO market.
On the Money
The Fear & Greed index, which indicates what emotion is driving the market. As we can see, the market is firmly standing in ‘Greed’ this week, more so than last! If we compare this with last year’s ‘extreme fear’, I’d say capitalism is moving back to its wrongful place in society (and we love that for society.)
Throwback to the pandemonium circa 2020
BIE - BIG INVESTMENT ENERGY
A few investments that have caught my eye include:
By all means, this is NOT investment advice. Rather, potential stocks that are giving BIE.
If there’s anything you’d like me to include or exclude, please feel free to provide your feedback to @uneesafinance on twitter or drop me an email!
‘Til next time, xoxo