© Reuters.
By Peter Nurse
Investing.com – European stock markets will start opening lower on Friday, with investors cutting positions due to the uncertainty surrounding the populist trading movement.
At 02:05 ET (0705 GMT) the contract traded 0.5% lower in Germany, down 1% in France and down 0.9% in the UK.
Global equities are at their worst weekly slide in about three months, in part due to the turmoil organized by retailers across online forums such as Reddit to force hedge funds to reverse short positions in a range of stocks. As a result, these funds have dumped other equity interests to obtain liquidity.
Retailers have been limiting their trading ability for some time on Thursday as brokers, including popular online broker Robinhood, cut their loans and restricted trading in some of the companies in the spotlight, such as GameStop (NYSE 🙂 and AMC Entertainment (NYSE 🙂 . .
However, Robinhood has since stated that some will be lifted on Friday, raising fears that volatility will resume as the week ends.
This has contributed to concerns about the slow explosion of vaccines on the European continent, a region hit hard by the Covid-19 virus, which has led to a rift between the European Union and drug manufacturers over the spread of limited stock.
There was good news on the subject, after biotechnology firm Novavax (NASDAQ 🙂 said late Thursday that it was more than 89% effective in protecting the virus in its Phase Three clinical trial conducted in the UK.
In the corporate news, the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson (BS 🙂 reported strong core earnings in the fourth quarter due to the healthy sales of 5G equipment.
To stay in the sector, Orange (PA 🙂 had the talks late Thursday with Ilias (PA 🙂 on achieving a mobile network in France.
The most important economic releases in Europe on Friday are the German for January and the country’s fourth quarter.
Earlier, at the end of last year, Frans shrank much less and fell by 1.3% in the last three months of 2020, compared to a forecast for a contraction of 4%.
Oil prices have stabilized largely on Friday as traders balance concerns about weakening demand due to Covid-related travel restrictions with the upcoming supply cuts from Saudi Arabia as well as the drop in inventories.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter of oil, will cut production by 1 million barrels a day in February and March in an effort to balance a market hit by travel restrictions, while the world sees an increase in cases of coronavirus fighting, a battle made more difficult by the discovery of new infectious strains.
In addition, U.S. oil last week fell the most since July to its lowest level since March.
U.S. crude futures traded 0.1% lower at $ 52.28 a barrel, while the international standard contract rose 0.1% to $ 55.16.
Elsewhere, it rose 0.5% to $ 1,851.20 per ounce, while trading 0.1% lower at 1.2107.