– This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on July 3, Monday.
In the first half of the year, global trade market was astounding with the best performing market hailing from the Asia region. Let's do a market round-up. Amongst all Asia stock markets, the leading market is Korea, increasing more than 18% in half a year. Following closely behind is Hong Kong Hang Seng, increasing by 17% in the past half year. Trailing behind Hong Kong is India, increasing more than 16%. Globally, they are the strongest three markets.
The Shanghai Index rose by 2.8%.The Philippine Index went over 14%. The Malaysia Index increased 4.8%. Japan Index increased by 4.8% and last but not least the Indonesian Index increased over 10%. According to analysts, this upward trend presents a positive and promising outlook for the Asia's stock market. On a whole, this also makes the global stock market phenomenal. In the first half of the year, MSCI's emerging market index went up to 17.4%, surpassing the developed markets. Following the weakening of the American dollar, analysts have expressed that Asia markets, like the Japan stock exchange, would continue to remain rosy.
The upward trend of some small emerging stock markets looks promising. For example, in the first half of the year, Venezuela's index increased by 280% whereas Latvia, Greece and Ukraine all increased more than 30%. The worst performing stock is the Russian RTS Index. For the first half of the year, it plummeted 13.8%. Following this, let's take a look at developed markets.
In America, the rise of technology stocks propelled the stock market to an impressive position. In the first half year, S&P 500 grew 8.2%. The Dow Jones Index increased 8%. In 2013, they were named the best first-half performance indices. On the other hand, tech-heavy Nasdaq saw an increase of over 14%, making it the best first-half performance index since 2008.
The stocks in S&P 500 that saw an estimate increase of 40% all came from the top five technology companies in America. They are Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. Due to the decline of the American economic indicators in the later half of the year, investors are starting to doubt whether the US Federal Reserve will be able to increase the interest rate by the end of this year. Furthermore, there are doubts as to whether Trump can keep his promise to boost the American economy. All these doubts are hampering the US Dollar. Recently too, technology stocks are showing signs of call backs while financial stocks and energy stocks are bouncing back. Following these, will such a trend in transfer of financial resources be continued? We will continue to observe.
In June, the FTSEurofirst 300 recorded its greatest plumment yet in the first half of the year, it increased 5%. FTSE 100 increased 2.38%, DAX index increased 7.35% while CAC40 increased by 5.31%.
Meanwhile, the market is expecting the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to adopt a tighter monetary policy. As such, it is foreseeable that in the second half the year that the Europe stock market and exchange rate will be a focal point.
Brought to you by Chen Qian from CNBC Asia's Headquarters.