Market news as on February 14th, 2014

After Janet Yellen’s intrusive comments about the monetary policy, stocks are reportedly gaining to a considerable extent. She had stated that the economy needed to improve further and that the asset purchases don’t follow a pre-set course. Yesterday, the stocks ended a little lower and the investors locked in their gains. At the end of the US trading session, the S&P 500 went down by about 0.03% while the Dow Jones was down by 0.19%.

As a result of a negative lead from US, the Asian stocks were low too. This resulted in Nikkei with a decrease of about 1.79% while Hang Seng decreased by about 0.54%. The Japanese Yen was strong against the dollar but this happened after Lenovo displayed low earnings.

Traders will focus on the inflation data to be released from China tomorrow at about 2am. As some political issues in Italy have surfaced, the European stocks opened low too. Disappointingly, EURO STOXX went down by about 0.29% while CAC 40 from France declined by about 0.21%. DAX 30 from Germany slipped by 0.24% too.

EIA displayed an increase in the inventories and stood at about 3.3 million barrels last week. As a result, the WTI Crude decreased after this. Gold reached its best high since 3 months as investors are expecting that the Feds slow down with their pace of tapering. It appears like there is a slight decrease as the prices increased, the physical demand declined. Investors should look out for the US Retail sales scheduled at 1.30 pm. Janet Yellen was all set to testify for the second day but it was postponed because of the weather.

Main events scheduled today:

EUR-ECB Monthly report at 09.00

USD-Core retail sales at 13.30

USD-Retail sales at 13.30

USD-Initial Jobless Claims at 13.30

(Timings displayed are in GMT)