NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wall Street’s advice to investors battered by plunging markets: Keep buying stocks.
With markets plunging for more than a week, and no relief in sight, some of the biggest brokerages on Thursday afternoon and early on Friday told their advisers that clients should not flee but instead buy into the panic.
The year is 2015, and it’s late in the month of June. Central bank policymakers have been meeting for two days. Now it’s late in the afternoon of that second day, and Bernanke’s traditional press conference is set to start at any moment. Investors the world over have stopped everything to hear what the U.S Fed leader has to say.
Bernanke is still not the longest-serving Fed chairman: With only nine years under his belt, he has a decade to go before he’d have more service time than predecessor Alan Greenspan, or the legendary William McChesney Martin.
Neither the multifaceted disaster in Japan nor the domino-like progression of political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa has prevented the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ($INX) from climbing 13.4% in the first quarter of 2011. And some stocks performed as if we were living in the best of times.
Among the index’s top 10 performers was CB Richard Ellis Group (CBG), a commercial real estate company that offers services to tenants, owners, lenders and investors.
The Los Angeles company’s stock climbed 30.4% in the first quarter, helped by better-than-expected fourth-quarter financial results and an improving outlook for commercial properties.
CB Richard Ellis recently raised $800 million through term loans to purchase the real estate investment unit of ING (ING).
Some analysts think the share price has limited upside potential after soaring 68.5% in the past 12 months. Yet the commercial real estate market, considered by some “the next shoe to drop,” is turning around faster than many observers expected.
If you’re looking to short Western currencies, one possibility is to short them against emerging-market currencies, such as the Chinese yuan, the Indian rupee, the Brazilian real and the Russian ruble.
India and Brazil are running large government budget deficits, in spite of their amazing booms, and both currencies are highly vulnerable to a sudden monetary tightening or a downturn in the global economy.
China, tightly manages its currency. There is certainly potential for the yuan to rise, provided that China maintains its present policy of allowing fairly free inflows of foreign capital while barring outflows of its own savers’ money.
Canada and Australia are reasonably well-run countries with large commodity exposures. So they should do well as long as the current commodity boom continues.
In the Asia-Pacific region, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore all have superbly-run economies that are structurally sound.
A currency portfolio that contains those five currencies – the South Korean won, the new Taiwan dollar, the Singapore dollar, the Canadian dollar, and the Australian dollar – could thus be relied upon to maintain its value better than most.
Global markets have climbed and the price of oil fallen after Hosni Mubarak stepped down as Egypt’s president.
“The market will be worried about the risk of contagion within the region and whether the Egyptian example will create a domino effect . They will be looking to be reassured that the region will remain stable over the coming weeks and months.”
On Wall Street, the Dow Jones iindex Dow rose 43.97 points, 0.4%, to 12,273.3, its highest close since June 2008. The Nasdaq index rose 0.7% to 2,809.4 points.
In London, the FTSE 100 shrugged off heavy losses to finish 0.7% higher at 6,062.9 points, while the key French and German markets also enjoyed late surges.