Welcome to the Investors Trading Academy economic calendar of the week.
Each week our news analysts review the upcoming economic events that you should be monitoring.
Although earning season had some good news last week, most of the reports were lackluster
with Wal-Mart warnings shaking up the markets.
This week is not expected to be much better.
Most of the major US banks reported their quarterly numbers, and falling income for
the trading desks was a common theme.
This week will see industrial and commodity-focused companies report their numbers.
There are around 30 companies to report earnings on Monday.
Among those to report are Morgan Stanley and IBM.
On Tuesday, almost 60 companies are to issue earnings including Lockheed Martin, Verizon
and Yahoo!. Poor inflation data from Western countries
will delay interest rises in the US and the UK, and Canada and the ECB could be on the
way to additional loosening of its monetary policies.
This week’s big economic event will be the ECB meeting on Thursday.
With growing speculation that the ECB will expand or extend its stimulus measures, that
correlation could reemerge where risk assets will perform quite strongly and fixed income
can perform strongly as well.
The central bank, which started its 1.1 trillion-euro asset-purchase plan in March, has an inflation
goal of just below 2 percent.
Analysts say that the ECB is widely expected to announce an extension of its stimulus plan
beyond the intended completion date of September 2016.
There is plenty to watch in China and the United States over the coming week.
The week kicks off on Monday in China when a raft of indicators is released.
Most interest will be in the economic growth figures for the September quarter.
Growth is tipped to have eased from the 7 per cent annualized rate recorded in the June
quarter.
However, on the same day, data on investment, production and retail sales are expected for
the September month.
While production growth has softened to a 6 per cent annualized rate, retail spending
is growing at a 10.4 per cent annualized rate in inflation-adjusted terms.
It takes a while for this to sink in: the second largest economy on the planet is recording
10 per cent annual growth in real consumer spending.
On Friday so-called 'flash' or preliminary readings on manufacturing activity are expected
in the US, Europe, China and Japan.
While the value of producing an extra indicator can be questioned, the final reading is released
around a week later- some analysts continue to follow the data.