logo

It may also boast a former chief executive of the Stockholm exchange as its head

Posted by admin   ·     ·   Jump to comments

It may also boast a former chief executive of the Stockholm exchange as its head but it has only 15 listed investments to its name.Still, DIFX seems determined to take its place at the table. The grandly named Dubai International Financial Exchange may be backed by the Maktoums, which presumably gives it an open chequebook to play with. This new addition to the cast of characters could hardly be more incredible had it come straight out of the script for Footballers' Wives. Confused? You will be after the next exciting instalment of Soap, an everyday story of stock market folk.The latest episode has the Dubai stock exchange emerging as a 1.7 per cent shareholder in Euronext. Deutsche B? wanted to merge with the London Stock Exchange but was thwarted by anti-German feeling.

Undeterred, Deutsche returned for a second bite at the cherry but was repulsed after hedge funds sacked the chief executive.The London Stock Exchange was meanwhile flirting with Euronext, Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, who were all also flirting with each other, only not Nasdaq and the NYSE, who hate and despise each other so much that they would sell their own grandmother to prevent the other getting its hands on the LSE. Bar a nuclear strike on Iran, or some such other madness, the present surge in stock prices may have further to run yet Now Dubai joins the stock exchange soap The story so far. Corporate profits may soon be under pressure too, with rising interest rates and energy costs compounded by a slowdown in consumption.Yet bull markets need some kind of a trigger to bring them to an end, and at this stage it's hard to see what that might be. There is also a queue of IPOs as long as your arm building up to tap investors' new-found appetite for equities, which in itself is nearly always a bad sign. This is a phenomenon that generally comes to be seen as marking the beginning of the end of the bull market. Is that the message to be drawn this time around? Certain sectors of the market are beginning to look more than a little frothy.

As households rediscover the will to save, equities have become the investment of choice. After the famine of recent years, fund managers report a veritable tidal wave of retail money heading for the stock market. Stock market lore has it that when the retail investor arrives en masse, it's time to head for the exit. With the FTSE 100 regularly closing at new five-year highs - it's risen by nearly a 1,000 points over the past six months - the great British public has finally woken up to the fact that equities have for some years now been offering a superior rate of return to housing All of a sudden they are piling in like lemmings. That possibility should not be discounted, even if a move either way seems many months off.. The UK has become an economy that would find a further rise in interest rates quite alarming.

readers comments

Comments are closed.

NBA

NBA

MLB

MLB

NFL

NFL

NHL

NHL

WWE

WWE

Your sideblock text goes here