MONEY MASTER

2016 bad start continues and it's no longer a question of whether it's a bear market or not. It's a question of how bad will this bear market looks like. According to Bloomberg report, the global equity bear market was poised to deepen in Asian trading, with index futures foreshadowing losses from Hong Kong to Japan amid soaring demand for haven investments. IT'S A RED MARKET EVERYWHERE Here's a quick look at how the rest of the world is performing. The yearlong decline in global equities that started with a selloff in energy became a full-blown bear market Thursday as a rout in bank shares extended losses in the broadest worldwide gauge past 20 percent. The MSCI All-Country World Index slipped 1.3 percent, pushing its decline since May to 20 percent and marking the biggest retreat from risk since Europe’s sovereign debt crisis in 2011. Every industry has fallen since last year’s record high with decreases exceeding 25 percent in financial stocks and 3...

2016 didn't start off brightly, especially in the global stock market, with China's slowdown seems to be worse than expected and the oil supply glut has yet to improve. The China's circuit mechanism in trying to control the volatility of the market has failed and make things worse....so, the big question now: just where the market is heading? It is common for us to have different views on the market outlook but here are the summaries that we collect from some of the "experts" in the industry. MAYBANK IB Maybank Investment Bank (IB) expects the current volatility in the stock market to continue, especially in the first quarter of 2016. Maybank IB Regional Chartist & Economics Lee Cheng Hooi was reported by Bernama as saying the factors impacting the stock market would be largely externally induced by headwinds revolving around US monetary policy normalisation, China's structural slowdown and emerging market impact. Meanwhile, for the first half...

Some analysts have the view that the start to the year typically are associated with the post-holiday blues with low volume. It was reported in StraitsTime that analyst, Charles Kong said, "Markets usually edge up on low volume. People take time to recover from the holidays and traders don't usually jump in straightaway." Well, the theory has been immediately discarded when 2016 kickstart. All numbers in red and sell orders piling up. The China market was in a free fall with a survey of China's manufacturing confirmed fears that growth was slowing in the second largest economy. The yuan also fell to its lowest in five years. Investors were also getting used to the circuit breaker, with so many people rushing to sell and worries of being caught stuck once the circuit breaker triggers the close of the exchange. Source from Bloomberg Over the past week, investors lost an estimated US$2.3 trillion (S$3.3 trillion) across global markets. In Singapore alone, th...