Stocks take a stumble

Expensive markets have shown themselves to be vulnerable to bad news.

Stocks have had another bout of vertigo. America's S&P 500 fell by 2% last week. Britain's FTSE 100 lost almost 3%, its worst week in nine months. Traditional safe havens, such as government bonds and gold, strengthened. The latter has hit a six-month high above $1,380 an ounce.

Concerns for rattled investors include China's slowdown, the Crimean stand-off and the prospect of tighter US monetary policy. The main problem, however, is that markets look expensive, which makes them vulnerable to any sort of bad news.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.