The bulls are coming back: Traders received the greenlight to jump into risk assets on Friday. It culminated in a substantial jump across global equities and a certain “risk-on” attitude to trading. The impetus was arguably more technical than fundamental. The boost in sentiment in being attributed mostly the leaked news that Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin was planning to lift US tariffs on China. Whatever the motive, nefarious or simply untrue, that story was quickly denied by the White House. However, it signalled enough to the market that progress was being made in trade war negotiations. That extra fuel to this recovery’s fire supported a push above very significant technical levels in Wall Street indices, attracting buyers and further validating the view that the December sell-off is behind us.

The stock market’s biggest fan: There’s one market participant who is apparently willing that notion to be true: US President Donald Trump. The US President obviously uses the stock market’s performance as a measure of his success – rightly or wrongly. And over the weekend, amidst the very many Tweets that were Tweeted by Trump, this one outlined his view on the US economy and stock market: “the Economy is one of the best in our history, with unemployment at a 50 year low, and the Stock Market ready to again break a record (set by us many times)…” Quite a pledge to make – and one markets participants aren’t going to take too seriously. Regardless, it does provide a perversely comforting story for markets, to know that the US President is wishing this market higher.

Join the IG conversation on Community. "There's lots of talk about 'the smart money' banks, institutions, pension funds and the like but not much about the others side of the coin, 'the dumb money', why is that - it's because they just aren't influential to the market. The collective size of the dumb money is dwarfed by the big money to the point of being irrelevant."

Netflix announced subscriber growth of 8.8 million over the past year giving them a total of more than 139 million. Meanwhile, their quarterly revenue was up 27% from the same period in 2017 but the share price is down 3% as they failed to hit analysts’ expectations.