It was another good week for US stocks this week, with the sixth week of gains out of seven. The S&P 500 index touched an all-time intraday high of 2,019 in early trade on Friday but fell later in the day to finish at 2,010.

For investors in Chinese companies, Sino-Forest Corp., is one of the most infamous examples of an investment gone very bad when it declared bankruptcy in 2012 after once being valued at nearly $6 billion.

The US dollar has been unstoppable of late with the Dollar Index which compares the currency against a basket of other global currencies rising to 84.3. It is now up for nine weeks in a row, a record not seen since 1997.

Sterling is tumbling today after reports over the weekend that the yes campaign on Scottish independence appear to be getting the upper hand with the vote 10 days away

There was key news from the US on Friday that the non-farm payrolls numbers showed that the American economy added only 142,000 jobs compared with expectations between 220,000 and 230,000, the weakest gain since December 2013.

An interesting chart from John Sussman:

The FTSE 100 is currently trading marginally below its all time high of 6,930 set in December 1999, just before the infamous Dot com crash and set a 14 year high this morning.

For emerging markets watchers, the revival of the Indian economy in recent months has been reassuring under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has driven the Sensex India index to record highs

The MSCI Emerging markets index has had a strong run since a sharp sell off between the end of 2013 and February 2014. Country by country performance in the emerging markets as a whole has been markedly variable with Russia being the stand out poor performer of the so called BRIC…

In February 1998, the key US index the S&P 500 hit 1,000, on the 25th August the index moved through 2,000 for the first time.