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The bull is on top:
The German leading index Dax has already surpassed the third thousand mark this year -
Photo: DPA
Record run on the German stock exchange: The German leading index Dax reached a record level on Friday and cracked the round mark of 16,000 points. It is already the third thousand mark that the Dax has left behind this year: Since the beginning of the year, the German benchmark index of 13,719 points has already risen by almost 17 percent, similarly to the US benchmark index Dow Jones.
The spread of the delta variant, renewed lockdown fears and rising inflation have not been able to prevent investors from accessing stocks: Above all, the glut of money from the US central banks and the significantly increasing profits of companies compared to the first Corona year 2020 have ensured that investors still see more opportunities than risks despite the significantly higher valuations on the stock market.
But now the stock market month of September is approaching, and according to some stock exchange traders, it could be a rough autumn.
Dax, Dow and stocks at a glance
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Run with the herd
Some investors have recently held back in the hope of more favorable purchase prices and are now under pressure, said Thomas Altmann from asset manager QC Partners. Fund managers can quickly find it difficult to explain to their clients if they are not keeping pace with the market. Others see the breakout of the Dax to highs after the search for direction in the past few weeks as a fundamentally positive signal. So they continued to add to their equity positions.
So the Dax had not moved since the beginning of June.
Concerns about the rapid spread of the delta variant of the corona virus and high inflation rates were too great.
Extensive corona lockdowns and strong inflation could stifle the global economic recovery, they feared.
At least in the USA and many European countries, the authorities are now dealing with the corona situation in a more relaxed manner.
Inflation: Central bankers call rising prices a "temporary phenomenon"
And inflation is - at least currently - hardly a disruptive factor in people's minds. Your rise will be accepted. After all, this is only temporary and is due to the distortions of the 2020 pandemic, at least that is the thesis of the central banks. The coming months will show whether you are right - this will be one of the decisive factors in whether the price rally on the stock markets continues or stops abruptly.
Many companies have felt the rise in prices for a while, but pass them on to their customers as far as possible.
Overall, business has recently been good, as an analysis of the reporting season for the second quarter by the US bank JPMorgan shows: "The sales trend in the USA and Europe is robust."
The proportion of companies that exceeded expectations has shot up in both regions and has reached its highest level in a decade in the US.
Cautious words from the Fed
The central banks, above all the Federal Reserve (Fed) in the USA, are trying cautiously to prepare the markets for at least a slight tightening of monetary policy, which they had recently loosened again due to the corona crisis. A look at 2018 shows that kid gloves are absolutely appropriate. At that time, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell brought a normalization of monetary policy into play. As a result, the stock exchange prices fell sharply towards the end of the year.
According to Fed critics such as the market strategist Albert Edwards of the French bank Societe Generale, the stock markets have long been dependent on ultra-cheap money. "Central banks are slaves to the bubbles they create," wrote Edwards recently in his widely acclaimed Global Strategy Weekly. The markets - meaning the behavior of investors - are basically forcing the Fed to quickly pull back on tightening monetary policy.
This is how a lot of cheap money has been flowing into the stock markets for years - also due to the lack of alternatives.
If rising interest rates restrict the flow of money or make other investments such as account balances more attractive, investors are likely to withdraw at least some of their funds from the stock market.
If this happens on a large scale, prices can slide sharply - with consequences for consumption and the real economy.
Bitcoin climbs back above the $ 46,000 mark
Speculative investors have also been increasing their access to the crypto market for a few weeks now.
The risks of "staking" are increasingly being forgotten.
The cryptocurrency Bitcoin recovered significantly on Friday.
Most recently, the cyber currency fluctuated just above the $ 46,000 mark.
In the past four weeks, however, Bitcoin has recovered noticeably, in mid-July the cryptocurrency had fallen below the mark of 30,000 US dollars, but then started a price rally and gained around 50 percent within 5 weeks.
la / dpa-afx
