Week 9 was an odd week for Russian Stock Markets. Due to public holidays in Russia it lasted for four days: from Wednesday till Saturday. The week ended with a slight drop with RTS index declining by 0.49%. RTS index closing value last Friday was 1423.13 points and this Saturday RTS index closed at 1403.93 points. RTS index had significant fall on Thursday, which lasted till the mid day. Afterwards it was rising proportionally until the end of Friday, and ended with basically no activity throughout Saturday. Telecommunication and industrial shares experienced biggest improvements this week (3.41% and 3.46% respectively), while oil & gas sector rose only by 0.53%. As Russian indexes are very sensitive to oil and commodity prices we assume, the positive growth was driven mostly by rising oil prices, which climbed almost to 80$, and by news about an increase in commodity production. The causes of the rapid downside on Thursday could have been slight oil price decrease by 2 $, negative news from Greece and an announcement of two big oil companies merger. Schlumberger Inc. bought Smith International shares worth 11 billion $ in that way increasing geographical coverage, which jeopardized Russian oil companies' competitiveness. This week's winner was Surgutneftegas (SNGSPS) preference shares (+4.54%) followed by FGC UES (FEESS) with 3.58% gain and Polyus Gold (PLZLS), which rose by 1.46%. The last three stocks were: Uralkaliy (URKAS) with drop of 3.85%, Sberbank (SBERS), which fell by -4.82% and Uralsvazinform (URSIS) closing the bottom list with 7.29% negative growth.

 

The 9^th and the final week of the investment game went rather steady for the OMX Helsinki 25 (OMXH25) index. The OMXH25 index started the week with a value of 2,064.13 and fluctuated until Wednesday. Then it had declined until it reached the week’s minimum of 2,049.65 and started recovering immediately afterwards, closing the trading session on Friday with a value of 2,071.79 summing up to a total +0.50% change. The week was ambiguous, chemical industry issued a strike notice and job lay-offs made the adjusted unemployment rate rise up to 9.1% compared to 6.6% rate in the same period in the previous year. Moreover the finance ministry published a 75mln pre-tax loss in 2009. Nevertheless, both the Finnish consumer and manufacturing confidence indexes are rising up making people believe the economy is slowly going back on its track.

 

 

The 9th trading week of 2010 is over. It happened to be really unfortunate for The Latvian Stock Exchange (RIG), as its index fell by 3.17%. Thus, the previous week’s advice to hold your hands tight on your money proved to be credible. OMX Baltic Benchmark GI has decreased as well (-0.73%), reaching 386.63 points at the end of the week. Despite that, activity in the market was bigger than previous week, as total turnover amounted nearly half million euros and there were almost 250 deals made. This week’s leader in terms of share price change was Ventspils Nafta (VNF1R), having experienced growth of 1.03%, which was the only positive change in the main list. Conversely, Latvijas Kugnieciba (LCS1R) has shown huge decrease in share price (-22.22%). In terms of weekly turnover, Grindeks (GRD1R) performed best, as almost a half of the total market turnover was generated by deals related to this company.

 

The 9^th week of the year continued the past few weeks’ downwards sloping trend of the Tallinn Stock Exchange (TSE), which decreased by 2.36%. That was the biggest decline in the Baltic market, where Riga Stock Exchange (RSE) and Vilnius Stock Exchange (VSE) went down by 2.05% and 0.27% respectively. In total there were only three companies that increased their value this week: Trigon Property Development(TPD1T) by 6.00%, Norma(NRM1T) by 3.14% and Harju Elekter(HAE1T) by 2.00%. The biggest decliners were Nordecon International AS (NCN1T) (decreased by 12.94%), Arco Vara (ARC1T) (8.68%) and Silviono Fashion Group (SFGAT) (6.03%).

 

Last week the majority of the stock markets across the world were going up but the Baltics chose the opposite direction. At least the decrease of OMX Vilnius was only 0.63 per cent while OMX Riga and OMX Tallin shrank by 4.21 and 3.89 per cent respectively. On Thursday, closing value of OMXV was already below 300 points, which is a psychological support level. Fortunately, on Friday the index slightly rebounded to 301.75 but it is still fluctuating in the dangerously low level.

This was a fluctuating week for the Stockholm Stock Exchange (STO). The OMX Stockholm 30 index (OMXS30) fell by 0.8% stopping at 947.39 points despite the better-than-expected company performance and macroeconomic outlook. The total turnover for the week was 986 million EUR. The massive drop on Thursday could be explained by the statement issued by the US Labor Department, which describes that initial jobless applications jumped to a three-month high. Furthermore, it was noted on the same day that further downgrades of Greece's credit ratings are possible, leading to bigger concerns in the Rurozone. In the graph: OMXS30 (blue), OMXH25 (red) and Dow Jones (green).