Now in the US, the thinning market business for June and July will have to withstand another difficult quarterly reporting season that kicks off next week. US banks, especially regional banks, retailers, property groups, airlines and some energy companies are on broking watch lists.
In fact any significant oil and energy consumer in the Standard & Poor's 500 will be watched closely: as will the big oil groups which boosted earnings by 26% in the first quarter and offset lacklustre returns from many domestic industrials (exporters did well, on the whole) and financial stocks.
Bloomberg reported Friday that the 468 companies in the S&P 500 which have reported quarterly results since April 7 have posted an 18% average fall in earnings, dragged down by an 88% plunge in profits at financial companies. Excluding them however, earnings rose 7.7%, boosted by that 26% rise by energy companies and an 11% gain for technology stocks.
n the US the Dow gained 1.3% last week, the S&P rose 1.8% and Nasdaq jumped a sharp 3.2%. For May, the Dow lost 1.4%, but the S&P 500 gained around 1% (its second monthly gain in a row) and Nasdaq added just on 4.5%.
Falling commodity prices and rising concerns about the strength of domestic demand hurt sentiment.
And we should also be watching the US for any tightening of rules covering trading in commodities by so-called index-long funds which have been wrongly blamed for much of the surge in the prices of oil, wheat, corn and soybeans. It's an election year in the US and politicians are nervous and in full blame mode and searching for culprits.
The corpulent political support for ethanol has probably had a greater impact on food prices, along with the Australian drought over the past two years. Oil prices have been hit by shortages, poor production levels (Indonesia is leaving OPEC after being a foundation member) and America's energy over consumption (a third more than Europe per head of population).
Markets in Europe and Asia were mostly up last week and mixed for May.
