Think Daily 6 May 2022

In Thursday’s trading session in the local markets, the Top 40 closed the day down by 1.06%. The Resources 10 sector went down by 1.56%, the Financial 15 went down by 1.33%, the Industrial 25 went down by 0.92% and lastly, the South African Listed Property index went down by 0.13%. The rand traded at R16.03 against the United State Dollar, R19.76 against the Great British pound, and R16.84 against the Euro. In yesterday’s trading session, local markets continued the sell-off with all of the sectors closing in the red, once more. Sibanye Stillwaters’ share price dropped by nearly 8% after the company reported an operating update.  



Figure 1: Sibanye Stillwaters intraday chart  
 

On the commodities front, the Brent Crude oil is trading at $111.70  a barrel and WTI Crude oil is traded at $109.05 a barrel. Gold Spot price is currently trading at $1875.96. Platinum Spot is now trading at $959 and lastly, Palladium Spot price is at $2176.50. As for oil, prices are up about 4% so far this week, buoyed by the EU’s proposal to phase out supplies of Russian crude in six months and refined products by the end of 2022. 
 

Across the globe, the S&P 500 closed the day down 3.56%, Dow Jones closed down 3.12% and the Nasdaq had a 5.06% drop. The FTSE 100 closed up 0.13% and the DAX was down 0.49% and CAC40 was up 0.43%. In the Asian markets, the Nikkei 225 is up 0.69% and the Hang Seng is down 3.86% currently. In the United States, the Dow lost more than 1,000 points and the Nasdaq plunged too, with both indexes notching their worst one-day drops since 2020. The S&P 500 also dropped 3.56% on its second-worst day of the year. Technology stocks were hit hardest in yesterday’s selloff, with sharp losses from Tesla (-8.3%), Apple (-5.6%), Amazon (-7.6%), AMD (-5.6%) and Microsoft (-4.4%).