Focus likely to shift from US Fed to Brexit

ACCORDING to news reports, Friday's Wall Street slide was partly due to Brexit worries. On one hand, this is hard to understand, since the June 23 UK referendum on whether Britain should stay or exit the European Union has been on the agenda for several months and its implications should have by now been absorbed if not discounted by the market.

Then again, with the predominance of high-speed, very short-term trading, markets today have the attention span of a one-year old, so perhaps Brexit as a sudden worry shouldn't be too surprising.

Since the federal futures market, reacting to weak US economic data currently attaches only a 2 per cent chance of the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates this week, it stands to reason that Brexit will be the market's number one focus until the vote's outcome is known.