LONDON: Global stocks hovered near record peaks on Friday as international tensions simmered and the dollar held near a six-week high as traders trimmed bets on Federal Reserve interest rate cuts.
Safe-haven gold was little changed, while oil prices rebounded from an earlier retreat after US President Donald Trump adopted a wait-and-see attitude towards Iran, having earlier threatened intervention. International politics has been the major focus for markets since the start of the year following Trump's action in Venezuela, threats to take over Greenland and tensions in the Middle East.
"Although it appears that we’ve sort of dialled down the probability of US intervention in the Middle East for the time being, I don’t think we can entirely rule that out”, Michael Brown, senior research strategist at Pepperstone, said.
Market participants may lack conviction ahead of the Martin Luther King Jr Day US holiday on Monday, Brown said.
"I wouldn’t be entirely confident if I was running a book to be long-risk or short-crude into a three-day weekend with this amount of Middle East tension going on", he said. The pan-European Stoxx 600 index was 0.1 per cent lower, after notching a record high on Thursday. The index was on track to end the fifth consecutive week in positive territory, bringing gains made at the end of 2025 into the new year. — Reuters
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