Will Wall Street decouple from the rest of world?

WALL Street's Friday plunge shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given that the Straits Times Index on the same day went down in anticipation of a US selloff. As a result, it's probable that the index will be relatively firm on Monday as the algorithms that sold or shorted on Friday will look to go long soon.

That's for the short term, the longer-term issue that traders should ponder over is whether the US economy and, by extension, Wall Street is decoupling from the rest of the world.

The reason for this is that 2015 is shaping up to be the year in which central bank action will be key in determining how markets and economies perform - in the course of a month, we've seen market-moving announcements from the US Federal Reserve, the Swiss central bank, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).