Markets this week

A much quieter week, without a G20 summit or anything else to create havoc.

No major bank collapsed or anything, it is almost as if everything has calmed down.

Anyway, here's the week-on-week changes:

FTSE: down 45.96 (1.14%)

DOW: up 65.79 (0.82%)

£: down $0.0181 (1.22%)

£: up €0.0126 (1.15%)

Oil: up $0.59, £0.85 or €1.40 (let this highlight the difference between commodity and currency fluctuation).

Gold: down $25, £9.52, €2.92 (so the dollar moved dramatically as measured in gold or €, whilst the €price hardly changed.

A final thought - there is a good reason why news reports mention the percentage rise, as well as the points rise of financial markets. Here is a display of the FTSE and the DOW (revalued into a common currency, in this case £ sterling). It shows their performace since the beginning of December 2008, re-indexed so that their recent peaks at the beginning of the year appear as 100. Again, as always on this blog, data is recorded weekly, not minutely or daily.

I feel that this shows how similar the performance of the two markets have been, in performance, when measured in a common currency. Since early March, both have recovered most of the losses experienced in February.