It’s a testy market out there today with the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 struggling to regain ground, while the hype surrounding Alibaba’s (BABA) impending IPO is causing the technology-heavy NASDAQ to soar just below 52-week highs. Alibaba is set to be the largest initial public offering ever, expecting shares to price in a range of $60 to $66 with roughly 2.5 billion shares offered for a total value between $148-163 billion. Geopolitical woes remain light today, although the European markets struggled today thanks to a vote in the UK which may result in Scotland succeeding from Great Britain to become its own country. At around 3:00PM this afternoon, we will receive a reading on the US consumer credit situation for the month of July. In the meantime, we continue to take a tour around the world and note some improvement in the Chinese economy.

In August, China’s trade surplus widened by $49.83 billion from $28.5 billion a year earlier, and beating economist forecasts. The surplus marks a record high for the second straight month in August as exports drastically increased while imports declined. Chinese exports increased 9.4% over last year to $208.5 billion of the month of August; however this was lower than the 14.5% increase in the month of July, but an improvement relative to market expectations. Sales to the US increased by 11.4% over last year, while sales to the European Union increase 12.2%. In contrast, sales to Japan fell 1.7% and exports to South Korea decreased 12.6%. China saw its imports drop 2.4% year-on-year to $158.6 billion in August after falling 1.5% percent in the previous month. Purchases from the United States fell by 3.1% over last year while imports from the EU increased 4.5%.