Stock Selloff Goes Global – Let’s Hope This Improves Overnight

Ok, well first thing Sunday we documented a relatively rough session for Mideast markets which fell pretty much across the board, taking their lead from the decline in international equities late last week. Here’s an excerpt from that post:

Again, the question is always whether everyone is playing catch up or whether a global rout ends up feeding back into its source, thus effectively throwing gas on the fire.

On that score, the week didn’t get off to a good start. Of course it’s early and after this post we’ll reserve further judgement until we see how things close in Asia, but this is how it started:

https://twitter.com/DavidInglesTV/status/960304793830002689

An hour+ plus on and things hadn’t improved.

https://twitter.com/DavidInglesTV/status/960331005293809664

I panned out a bit from today with the charts below, just to kind of give you some perspective on how things are shaping up for the month beyond this morning’s knee-jerk moves.

One of the biggest losers in the early going was the Kosdaq which fell as much as 3.3%, the largest dip since November 9, 2016. The Kospi’s down pretty hard too:

So that’s South Korea.

In Japan, the Nikkei and the Topix were hit hard right of the gate:

Nikkei Stock Average Volatility Index up as much as 30%

— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) February 5, 2018

You want to watch Hong Kong closely. H-shares were one of the big winners in January and the Hang Seng has enjoyed a tail wind from relatively cheap valuations to start 2018. “All the usual high-beta candidates in Asia are likely to be in the firing line this week, with the Hang Seng index set to be a barometer of the depth of bearish sentiment,” Bloomberg’s Mark Cudmore wrote a couple of hours ago.

Well have a look at the gap lower on the Hang Seng at the open:

Yeah; that’s not pretty. Same thing with H-shares:

So again, we’ll go ahead and reserve further judgement until the end of the trading day in Asia, but irrespective of how things pan out, this is indicative of how quickly things can go awry.

Oh, and U.S. futures are looking pretty bad as of this writing.