Traditional Markets

Stock markets are rather quiet today as we await the announcement from Mario Draghi and the European Central Bank (ECB).

The ECB is currently injecting about €30 Billion of stimulus into the economy each month. Though this is far less than they were doing at the peak of global QE a few years ago the feeling is that they'll need to reduce it further going forward.

The issue is that despite the massive amount of stimulus the Eurozone has been showing signs of weakness.

Of course, it would be very difficult for any central banker to admit that their respective economies are slowing down. So even though nobody expects any concrete changes to the ECB's monetary policy, investors today will be watching like vultures.

Here we can see that the Euro has been gaining strength against the USD ever since the French elections in April. After running into some resistance at 1.25 it now seems that this strong trend is under question.

Earnings Continue

Yesterday's announcements on Wall Street weren't too bad. Facebook managed to defy the calls of #DeleteFacebook and has even managed to gain new users, and even Twitter managed to put up a profitable quarter for the second time in history.

Over to Europe, things are not looking so hot in the financial sector. Barclays faced a quarterly loss of £764 million but the big news rocking the markets today is that Deutsche Bank, which was expected to announce a Q1 profit of €376 Million, disappointed investors with profits of only €120 Million.

Even though this is a massive miss, it might not be as bad as some think. You'll recall that DB recently switched CEOs right at the beginning of Q2, so there is a clear scapegoat here. 

The new CEO Christian Sewing seems to be treating the below-expected earnings as an opportunity rather than a setback and has announced some massive reforms that he feels can improve the bank's profitability. 

At the moment, DB has more than 100,000 employees in 70 countries. From today, many of those outside of Germany will expect to receive notice as DB consolidates its business to try and focus on its core market.

Sewing was brought in to be the gunman when Crayn simply couldn't pull the trigger. Now it seems that a lot of people are about to get fired.

Will Ethereum Split?

Though the DNS hack yesterday was shocking the damage was rather contained. Ethereum enthusiasts have a much bigger concern on their minds at the moment, the aftermath of the last major Ether hack.

We discussed the Parity hack that froze about 514,000 ETH in a previous market update titled Security & Stability (dated November 8th, 2017). Now the owners of those tokens are doing whatever they can to try and get them back.

Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-999 proposes that the upcoming hard fork that is planned to move Ethereum to the Casper protocol will also be used to release the frozen tokens from the Parity hack.

After a week-long vicious vote, the results are in and it seems Parity is out.

In the wake of this narrow yet clear vote not to go ahead with EIP-999 it seems that some of the top developers plan to go forward anyway.

True to character, Vitalik Buterin has been notably silent on this issue. He generally prefers to allow the community to come to some sort of decentralized resolution without the aid of his authority.

Mind you, even if we do see a chain split it might not have a negative effect on the price of Ethereum. There is a distinct possibility that we could see a new coin created that is different from the original like we did with Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Cash, both of which seem to have generated wealth for token holders.

Let's have an amazing day ahead!!