Daily summary: Stocks slide as market's attention shifts to US inflation

• Wall Street indices trade lower today with Nasdaq being top laggard (around -0.5%) and Dow Jones outperforming (around -0.1%)

• Russell 2000 traded around 1% down at the start of Wall Street session today as regional bank shares found themselves under pressure again. However, as those stocks recovered during the session, sentiment began to improve

• European stock market indices traded mostly lower today. UK FTSE 100 dropped 0.18%, French CAC40 declined 0.59% while German DAX traded flat

• Energy commodities managed to recover from earlier losses and now oil is trading almost 1% higher on the day

• USD and GBP are the best performing major currencies while EUR and AUD lag the most

• US President Biden is set to meet with congressional leaders today at 9:00 pm BST and discuss debt ceiling issue

• White House said it will start refilling Strategic Petroleum Reserves once storage maintenance works are completed

• Bank of Japan Governor Ueda said that BoJ will end its YCC program and trim balance sheet once inflation target is reached in sustainable way

• ECB Nagel said that rates in EMU should rise further. ECB Kazaks said that market is premature to pricing in rate cuts as early as 2024

• Fed Williams said he expects inflation to drop to 3.25% this year and reach a 2% inflation target by 2025. HE also said he does not see any reasons to to cut rates this year

• Bloomberg reported that Italy plans to withdraw from China's Belt and Road initiative amid deterioration in ties between two countries

• Chinese exports were 8.5% YoY higher in April (exp. +8.0% YoY) while imports were 7.9% YoY lower (exp. 0.0% YoY). Trade surplus reached $90.21 billion (exp. $71.6 billion)

• Japanese household spending dropped 1.9% YoY in March (exp. +0.5% YoY)

• Novavax surged 50% after company announced massive layoffs and said its vaccine trials are showing positive results

DE30 managed to halt declines at 200-hour moving average (purple line) earlier today and has since tried to recover. The index climbed back above 16,000 pts mark and is approaching the 16,050 pts resistance zone. Source: xStation5