World Wide Market Declines, from Victor Niederhoffer

There has been much talk in the media these days about declines in world wide markets, especially that the Arab ones might spill over into ours. I took the liberty of looking at the some 350 (depending on how you account for overlapping indexes on the same market) stock markets followed by Bloomberg in Asia, Europe, Africa, Middle East, and North and Latin America. I find that 340 of them are up year to date, with the average of about 8%. Here are the downs, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Nigeria, Kuwait (-12%), Bahrain , Jordan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, (-35%), Taiwan (-1%), South Korea ( -1.5%), Jamaica. I query to what extent a good first quarter all around is predictive of other quarters, and whether there are any gravitational effects around. and to what extent this backdrop is factored into the public consciousness.