Weekly Market Update: 17th Apr
17/04/2026
Rachel Winter discusses the new record high for the S&P 500, a strong quarter for US banks, and the upcoming SpaceX IPO.
Rachel Winter
Partner, Investment Management
Transcript
Good morning and welcome to the Killik & Co market update.
Markets have responded well this week to the ceasefire talks between Israel and Lebanon, and the S&P 500 has actually hit a new record high – it’s back up over 7000.
It does feel like a bit of an uneasy record high. If we look within the index, over 40% of the 500 individual constituents are more than 20% below their own record highs, and so the record high for the overall index is being propped up by a relatively small number of stocks – primarily in the energy and technology sectors.
That said, the IMF published some updated economic growth forecasts this week, suggesting that the US economy will be one of the least impacted by the war in Iran. The dark green bars on here show the predictions for 2026 growth that the IMF published in January this year, and the bright green show the updated predictions. US growth has dropped from 2.4% to 2.3%. The UK is expected to be the worst impacted because it’s reliant on energy imports – growth will fall from 1.3% down to 0.8%.
The IMF also expects inflation to remain above target for most of the G7 economies this year. The dark green bars here show expected inflation for this year and the bright green show expected inflation for next year. The UK and US are joint highest for this year at 3.2%.
A new acronym has emerged this week – the ‘BIFs’ – which stands for Britain, Italy and France. These are the European economies that are expected to be the worst impacted by the Iran situation, and the economies that have experienced the biggest rise in borrowing costs since it started. Here are the yields on 10-year government bonds for the BIFs and how they have moved over the last five years. You can see the yields have risen this month, which suggests that investors are less keen on holding these bonds.
There are some beneficiaries of the war in Iran though. We’re in the early stages of quarterly earnings season, and the big banks have been reporting very strong trading revenues – which typically happens when markets are volatile.
Here are the revenues that JP Morgan has reported for its markets and securities division for the first quarter of 2025, the last quarter of 2025, and the most recent quarter. Pink shows revenue for fixed income, or bond, trading, and green is for equities. You can see the most recent quarter has been incredibly strong.
Although the financial sector still feels rather unpopular since the financial crisis. The performance of some of the big US banks has been very strong indeed. Here we have the share prices of JP Morgan in green, Goldman in pink, and the S&P 500 in black. The two banks have outperformed the index, despite dropping considerably in 2008.
We do have a few US banks on our research coverage list so go give us a call to here more.
Lastly, there have been quite a few headlines about the upcoming IPO of spacX, elon musk’s space exploration company. It has been suggested that the company is looking to raise $75bn, which would make it by far the biggest ipo in history.
Here’s a list of the top ten biggest IPOs in history. Some of these occurred a long time ago, so we have inflation adjusted the figures to make them all comparable. The biggest ever was a Japanese telecoms company, NTT, which raised the equivalent of $44bn. The biggest in recent memory was Saudi Aramco - $25.6bn. If Musk succeeds in raising $75bn this would be a huge milestone.
UK retail investors will not have access to this US IPO, but there has been interest in some UK investment trusts which currently own some of the private shares in SpaceX. Most of this are managed by Baillie Gifford. Baillie Gifford US Growth 11.9%, Edinburgh Worldwide 16.3%, Scottish Mortgage 15.4%. Performances have been strong in the last 12 months – as shown by this chart.
That said, these sorts of relatively high risk investment trusts containing shares in smaller companies and private companies fell heavily out of favour in 2022 when interest rates rose, and they’re still making their way back to that point – as shown by this five year chart.
Next week – busy due to earnings season – big one for miners -BHP, Rio and Newmont.
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