Market Commentary for November 2024
News generators
By Alan Hull
I am not seeing clear technical signals from the markets but there are a lot of news generators around the world. The U.S. Presidential election is now less than a week away with the polls neck to neck. The situation in the Middle East is losing momentum in the media, but not on the ground. And the Ukraine/Russian conflict is being fuelled by their allies…providing weaponry and now North Korea providing personnel.
And the last point is important because a clear path to further escalation is if the western allies & NATO provide personnel to Ukraine, to offset North Korea’s support for Russia. This is not a good development if we want to see a conclusion to this conflict and it is probably a matter of time before a Nuclear facility gets compromised. Ukraine operates 4 nuclear power plants with 15 reactors. And you can be certain that a development of this nature will upset the markets.
And it’s not a dissimilar story in the Middle East where I think the U.S. have been impressing the importance on the IDF to not target oil facilities. Let’s hope they value their allied support enough to make this directive stick…we’ll see. A disruption to oil supplies will also have a big impact on the markets.
Of course there is the pending U.S. Presidential election where I think it could still go either way. But whilst the Republicans are usually good for the markets, I think Trump is a loose cannon on deck given some of his recent rhetoric on China and also on crypto currencies. He is unpredictable and this is something that investors collectively don’t like…the unknown.
So in spite of the fact that Trump uses financial markets as a key economic barometer, a Trump Presidency won’t be smooth sailing. If he wins then I think there could well be an immediate rally but going forward into 2025, investors can expect some Whitehouse initiated volatility.
And I think a Democrat administration will be more of the same, which won’t be bad for the markets. I think the issue here is the short term uncertainty of civil unrest and a strong possibility that the Trump team will call foul. We’ve already had a taste of what this can lead to but I doubt Trump will have as much sway this time round, given that he isn’t the incumbent President.
But my point here is all these things are news generators of the first order and whilst stimulus is the joker that trumps all other factors (no pun intended)…news is in second place in my books. This puts technical analysis on the backburner as we enter November and so I haven’t used a single chart here. But there are plenty of charts in this month’s video review which you can check out by clicking on the following link…