Mark LaMonica: Welcome to another edition of Market Minute. We’ve got Bianca this week taking us through everything happening in market. So maybe just first an overview. We’re continuing to work through earnings season in the US. Anything investors should be aware of.

Bianca Rose: Yeah. So obviously seen a lot of market volatility this week. So while markets major markets around the world were generally up you know around 1 to 2%. We did see a lot of volatility during the week.

Mark: And let’s talk about a couple of the events that we’ve had. Maybe we’ll start in California. Situational awareness a hedge fund that has been in the media a lot. I guess an overview of what happened and if investors should care about this.

Bianca: The basic overview was that this head fund really liked AI. And and it’s definitely, you know, maybe you could be a theme that plays out over the long term, but they obviously took on quite a bit of leverage to play that out. And I believe they were called by SACs on some of their loans to bring them back and pay them back, and that forced them to sell a lot of their AI related stocks and kind of hit the market very heavily earlier in the week with those stocks.

Mark: Chipmakers have been in the news. So obviously they’ve gone up a lot. They’ve come back down a little bit, but we’ve actually had some news out of China that might disrupt, I guess, the existing order. So would you like to share some insights on that?

Bianca: The news out earlier in the week was that China is now mass making its deep ultraviolet chip making equipment, so it can do the extreme ultraviolet kind of chip making equipment, which is for the more advanced tips. But nevertheless it can make those kind of, I guess, memory and so on under the deep ultraviolet.

Mark: Okay, so a little more competition there. Yes. Let’s talk about geopolitics Iran. It is hard to figure out what’s going on. It seems like it changes every news cycle. But maybe just an overview of what’s happened. And I guess how you guys are thinking about this in terms of your portfolios.

Bianca: What we’re seeing is that pattern of, I guess, escalation, de-escalation, escalation and back and forth, if you like. I think ultimately, though, when we look at it, we do see that supply is still constrained in terms of, you know, ultimately straight kind of remains largely closed. So when we look at Europe, for instance, they are down quite a bit on their energy supplies.

And so it is something a longer term trend to kind of just be watchful of.

Mark: And then this impacts inflation. Central banks are at this point it seems like mostly holding. But yeah how does that impact.

Bianca: We had three central bank activities, you know, in terms of interest rate meetings and so on. Bank of Japan left rates on hold. So did the Bank of England and so did the US fed. So but really the key kind of watch point is that inflation outlook. And we are seeing that also with the RBA.

So we had seen some bond yield activity happen in the Australian market where we saw bond yields kind of go a little bit down over the week after like I guess views on inflation were that they were coming in a little bit.

Mark: And does that make bonds more attractive right now or do you still think that there’s that inflation risk.

Bianca: For us around a 5% and above level is kind of looking reasonable value for us. You know, it ebbs and flows. So we’d say, you know, you know reasonably attractive still just below five. But for us, you know, we’re not really taking that short term outlook on inflation. We’re kind of regarding it as a risk.

And so we’re sort of watchful of it. But for us it’s more about that bond yield is you know, if it’s kind of looking high enough then we’ll look to Adam.

Mark: Okay. Great. Well what’s going on as always, even if some of these patterns are repeating themselves. But really appreciate your insights.

Bianca: Thank you.