The global stock market sell-off continued yesterday and bearing the brunt of it were shares in the world’s largest social network.

Facebook fell a whopping 6.77% during yesterdays session after it was revealed that a massive data breach allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal information of 50 million users without their permission and use it in the 2016 Trump elections.

The hashtag #DeleteFacebook is now trending on Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has dropped by $5 billion overnight. 

However, this couldn’t possibly be the sole reason for the global sell-off. In fact, there are several other factors weighing on stocks lately and the entire year has been marked by heavy volatility and general uncertainty in the markets.

In today’s premium market webinar we will discuss some of those factors and some steps you can take to protect your portfolio. This webinar is usually held for Platinum members twice a month but due to the urgency of recent events, I would like to invite all of my readers to join in today at 15:00 GMT.

Today’s Highlights

Traditional Markets

Several financial websites pointed out a clear sign of weakness in global stock markets and the indicator that they’re pointing to is called VIX Backwardation.

As we know, the VIX index shows the level of volatility in the SPX500 stock index and after the record low levels witnessed in 2017, the first quarter of this year has been particularly bumpy.

What we don’t always pay attention to is that are the futures contracts of the VIX, Usually, the price of a VIX contract is more expensive the farther out you go. Meaning, traders are willing to pay a higher price for contracts that expire in a year from now than they are for one expiring next month. This is because the farther into the future you go the more uncertain things become.