It’s not a good week for the stock market.

All over the world, stock markets are taking a beating as escalating fears about global economic growth and ongoing trade tensions rattle investor confidence.

Asia’s biggest stock, Tencent, is getting hit particularly hard, falling as much as 6,8% in Hong Kong on Thursday.

The Chinese internet giant has lost about 20% in an unprecedented 10-day losing streak, reports Moneyweb, extending the losses since a January high to $252 billion in market value.

Tencent has been buying back small amounts of stock, though its leadership hasn’t commented on the recent losses or reported adding to holdings in their personal accounts. The company repurchased the equivalent of about $108 million of shares from Sept. 12 through Thursday, regulatory filings compiled by Bloomberg show.

According to Business Insider, concerns in Asia have been exacerbated by investor doubts that aid from China’s central bank will help prevent Trump’s trade war from triggering an economic slowdown.

US stocks saw their second consecutive day of losses yesterday, with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones both down more than 1% in morning trade.

“Some market pundits claim there is no real ‘new news’, but in our view, we have reached a critical mass on negative news, which has triggered this sell-off,” Witold Bahrke, senior macro strategist at Nordea Asset Management said in an email.

Here’s how markets looked at the European close yesterday:

• US MARKETS: Stock indexes were all trading down, with both the S&P 500 and Dow Jones more than 1% lower
• THE VIX: The Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX, commonly known as “the fear index,” is spiking.
• CHINA: The Shanghai Composite was down 5.2%.
• EUROPE: Asia’s bloodbath session has also entrenched itself in Europe, with virtually all major European indexes losing more than 1% of their value. Italy’s FTSE MIB index entered a bear market (a 20% decline within a two-month period), down 1.76% at 19,371.
• UK: Britain’s blue-chip FTSE 100, for example, lost 1.94% to trade at 7,007 points.
• BITCOIN: Cryptocurrencies weren’t spared either. All major crypto assets are down Thursday, with the likes of Ethereum and bitcoin cash losing more than 10% of their value.

China’s most important mainland index, the Shanghai Composite, dropped more than 5% during Thursday’s trading session. This is the second time in four days that it lost 4% or more of its value.

Those moves followed a bloodbath in the US. On Wednesday, the Dow Jones industrial average lost more than 800 points during the session, its third-biggest single-day point fall in history. Things spread to Asia overnight, with all major indexes on the continent witnessing major drops.

The craziness of the stock markets looks set to continue with more selling expected in equities today.

[sources:moneyweb&businessinsider]