How are you at spending and saving money?
Turns out, the answer may vary depending on your sex.
In our effort to uncover what drives people to make good investments, we recently ran a survey in the UK with some intriguing results.
Women are simply better at keeping a household budget than men. They’re less likely to make impulse purchases but for some reason, they’re more likely to view themselves as having poor spending habits.
Finally, the truth is out.
eToro, Senior Market Analyst
Today’s Highlights
Sustained Apathy
King Dollar
Russia Bitcoin Reserves
Please note: All data, figures & graphs are valid as of May 23rd. All trading carries risk. Only risk capital you can afford to lose.
Traditional Markets
Trade wars continue and the stock markets are still seeing in modest declines. This does not look like a bear market but rather a modest pullback at this point.
Volatility remains subdued and many stock indexes are just a few percentage points away from their all-time highs.
Minutes from the Federal Reserves last meeting released last night confirmed that the Fed is currently listening intently to the financial markets and ready to fulfill their needs. So they’re doing everything they can to support the stocks.
This morning, I received an alert saying that the German DAX index is falling, and indeed it is down 1.6%. Yet, when looking at the long term chart, we can see that the upward trendline is holding at the moment.
King Dollar
Meanwhile, the US Dollar is making some unexpected headway. Given that the Fed has changed its stance from trying to raise rates to now being more neutral, you’d expect the US Dollar to weaken a bit.
At the moment, as we can see in the bottom graph, the US Dollar Index is testing new highs.
True to their expected correlations, gold and crude oil have been softening in the last few weeks due to the stronger Dollar.
The question here is if we’ll see a breakout. Markets tend to move slowly at first and then all at once. So if we do see any sort of market panic buying the US Dollar it could lead to some pretty drastic market movements. Especially with the current trade war narrative rining throughout the media.
Bitcoin Reserves
The crypto pullback continues today. This movement was certainly expected and this relaxation is quite welcome. After running up 127% from January 1st to May 16th, bitcoin could certainly use a breather.
Volumes have cooled down over the last few days but are still quite high by historical standards. The ‘real 10‘ volume on bitcoin over the last 24 hours is still firmly over $1 billion. The CME bitcoin futures saw about $0.5 billion worth of action yesterday and on-chain bitcoin transactions are averaging at 4.23 per second.
One headline that particularly excited me yesterday comes from the Central Bank of Russia. The link above is in Russian, so I had to use google to translate it for this screenshot.
In short, the First Deputy Chairman of the Bank of Russia, Olga Skorobogatova, has stated that the law is sufficiently ready to be adopted this Spring.
Well, it’s spring now. We’re currently nearing the end of spring in most geographic regions, including Russia. In the crypto markets, we’re now seeing a crypto spring after coming off a prolonged winter.
Olga’s comments seem to be in response to a remark from Anatoly Aksakov, who said that the law was currently stuck. As we know, President Putin wants to get full regulation in place by July and Putin usually gets what he wants in Russia.
In any case, we’ve discussed before the possibility of the Russian Central Bank considering to add bitcoin as a reserve currency and from everything it seems, they’re doing their best to pave the way now.
Let’s have an amazing day!
Best regards,
Mati Greenspan
Senior Market Analyst
Your Social Investment Network – www.eToro.com
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