The week ahead

> PH:  The scheduled items start on Tuesday with the suspension of the Cirtek Warrants (TECHW). They’re worthless and will be delisted on August 19. After that, we get the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) decision on interest rates on Thursday. Lots of briefings and quarterly reports coming out, so there are bound to be some interesting developments that tumble out of those news items.

> International:  We’ll get the US CPI data for July on Thursday, and then on Friday we’ll get the updated jobless claims data. 

MB BOTTOM-LINE: This is the last week of full trading before we get two consecutive weeks that are interrupted by non-trading holidays. So far, this hasn’t been the kind of Deep Aughost that the oldheads keep talking about. The PSEi is up 29 points. That’s not a big deal but it’s better than a loss. The bigger deal to me is that the value turnover (~P5 billion) has been basically the same (on average) through the first seven days of trading in August as it was through all of July. The market wasn’t doing the best before Aughost, but at least it didn’t get worse. I don’t expect that to carry through those last two weeks, though. 

Merkado Barkada is a free daily newsletter on the PSE, investing and business in the Philippines. You can subscribe to the newsletter or follow on Twitter to receive the full daily updates.