Last week was characterized by European optimism regarding the Covid pandemic, as multiple nations lifted multiple restrictions, allowing life to return to something resembling somewhat “normal”. This optimism seems to have trickled down into equity markets, as the AEX climbed by 2,62%, the FTSE 100 by 1,69%, the Dow Jones by 3,50% and the NASDAQ by 2,23%. This marked a reversal as the losses from last week have been mostly recouped by this strong performance. A possible explanation for this is inflation fears being somewhat calmed by central banks, as they made clear that interest rate changes will not occur anytime soon. Additional infrastructure spending plans by the FED further alleviated these fears, and together with economic consumption increasing as a result of global vaccination efforts, provided a boost to equity markets over the past week.
Investors in cryptocurrencies fared a lot worse compared to their stock market counterpart, as prices of all major coins were taking trough a bumpy road with average daily fluctuations between 8 – 12%. China cracking down on bitcoin miners seemed to be the spark the lighted the fire, which caused Bitcoin to drop below $30,000, back to half of its value from it’s high in April. This volatility is reminiscent of bitcoin’s heyday back in 2017-2018, so only time will tell if history is doomed to repeat itself.
More importantly is that now we enter the final week of our investment competition! With last week’s strong stock market performance, the stage has surely been set for an interesting and nail-biting conclusion to this saga. Although the final results will be revealed after the 1’st of July, we can still see that everything is up for grabs. Alpha investment is still poised to enter the top 3 by climbing 2 additional spots, but we can only guess if this is good enough to make the final cut. Bullseye international climbed the most spots last week (+4) and Victoria managed to pull in the highest returns for the week (3,71%). Ares investment group was less fortunate and fell down by 6 additional spots, after suffering the biggest hit of last week with -3,83%.
As for the second investment competition, nothing has changed compared to last week. Das Kapital is still on top with their M2 of 12,85% and will likely face no challenge to their supreme rule. New Rotterdam Investments pulled in the highest return of the week with 6,31%, and IValue investment remains the gate closer with their M2 of -13,68%
