Morning Briefing: Markets mixed following Trump, Fed

Markets mixed following Trump, Fed
This week’s speech from Donald Trump together with comments made Wednesday by Fed speakers have combined with a strong performance from Wall Street to give many markets a lift Thursday.

However, there are still concerns about commodities and the detail behind President Trump’s headline-grabbing statements.

Asian markets closed mixed as banking stocks gained on expectation that US interest rates will rise this month. Regional earnings and a weakened yen also played their part with Tokyo and Sydney the strongest performers while Shanghai and Hong Kong lost ground.

European indexes are trending mostly flat with largely-positive data keeping things buoyant despite political uncertainty ahead of forthcoming elections in the region.

Wall Street and Toronto are expected to open mixed. Canadian GDP will be in focus.
 

	Latest	1 month ago	1 year ago
North America (previous session)
US Dow Jones	21,115.55 (+1.46 per cent)	+6.19 per cent	+24.95 per cent
TSX Composite	15,599.68 (+1.30 per cent)	+1.30 per cent	+19.83 per cent
Europe (at 5.00am ET)
UK FTSE	7,383.47 (+0.01 per cent)	+3.40 per cent	+20.11 per cent
German DAX	12,064.01 (-0.03 per cent)	+3.75 per cent	+23.40 per cent
Asia (at close)
China CSI 300	3,435.10 (-0.67 per cent)	+1.39 per cent	+12.58 per cent
Japan Nikkei	19,564.80 (+0.88 per cent)	+3.44 per cent	+16.83 per cent
Other Data (at 5.00am ET)
Oil (Brent)	Oil (WTI)	Gold	Can. Dollar
55.92 (-0.78 per cent)	53.39 (-0.82 per cent)	1244.30 (-0.46 per cent)	U$0.7484
			Aus. Dollar
			U$0.7626

Canadian GDP expected to show better Q4 than expected
The end of 2016 is expected to have gained by more than originally forecast when Canadian GDP data is released at 8.30am ET.

Year-over-year growth for December is predicted at 1.7 per cent, rising from 1.6 per cent on the previous reading; but the tone of the BoC’s interest rate announcement Wednesday could mean the final figure will be higher for the quarter as a whole.

The Conference Board of Canada believes that the 1.5 per cent forecast for Q4 2016 by the BoC may have been under by 0.5 percentage points with growth of 2.0 per cent.