Most markets eked out gains last week.
On Wall Street the Dow and S&P 500 ended the week with their seventh rise in eight trading sessions and the smallest of gains for the week.
Without Friday’s modest rise, the US markets would have been mostly in the red for the week or flat and up 0.1% for the week.
The S&P 500 index added 5.37 points on Friday, or 0.5%, to 1109.55 points.
That was 0.5% up for the week.
The Nasdaq composite index was up 6.28 points, or 0.3%, to 2242.48 and was up 0.4% over the four day week.
Our market will be up slightly this morning after futures trading overnight Friday left the ASX 200 up 12 points.
The market eased 0.5% on Friday, which trimmed the week’s gain to 0.4%.The Aussie dollar ended around 92.66 USc on Saturday morning.
Wall Street saw the lightest trading volume of the year so far because of the holiday Monday and Jewish New Year celebrations on Thursday and Friday.
Despite those factors, dealers said volumes remain well under a year ago.
Combined volume on the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange and Nasdaq was 5.68 billion shares, far below last year’s daily average of 9.65 billion, even accounting for the holidays.
And that’s have a direct impact with Bloomberg confirming that Liquidnet, the trading platform used by institutions such as mutual funds to buy and sell large blocks of shares, sacked 45 staff on Friday because of a slowdown in business.
The 5.68 billion shares traded on Friday was the lowest total for the year so far (and due in part to the Jewish New Year celebrations).
But Bloomberg points out that August volume was 8.7 billion shares a day, down nearly 10% from a year ago (so it’s not the low summer trading levels story).
So far this year, volumes in six of the 8 months have been down on a year ago.
In Europe the Stoxx 600 Index rose 1.7% last week and is now up 4.3% for the year so far.
Stockmarkets in 16 of the 18 major western European economies ended higher.
The majors all had similar modest gains: London was up 1.5%, Germany’s DAX was up 1.3% and France’s CAC rose 1.5%.
In Asia the MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose 1.5% on top of the previous week’s rise of 2.7%.
Tokyo’s Nikkei added 1.4%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index rose 1.4%, the Shanghai Composite was up 0.3%, South Korea’s was up 1.3% and Australia had the 0.4% rise.
The ASX200 index closed down 21.9 points on Friday, or 0.5%, at 4560.3, while the All Ordinaries index fell 20.6 points, or 0.5%, to 4600.7.
