US Fed rate hike? Reuters suggests it’s pretty unlikely there will be a rate hike at the US Federal Reserve’s Tuesday-Wednesday meeting after economic indicators last week suggested a slowdown in US retail sales and a manufacturing slowdown.

Active fund managers are having a really bad year: From New York, Stephen Foley and former Mideast hand Robin Wigglesworth write in the Financial Times that it’s a “fresh blow for stockpickers” as “nine out of ten US equity funds failed to beat the market over the past year.” The “scale of the disappointment in recent figures” in the report from S&P “is likely to fuel further outflows from an industry that is already under pressure.”

A looming global market meltdown? If you, like us, were a bit disconcerted to have your Eid vacation disturbed by an alert from the WSJ that the selloff in global stocks had accelerated, you may now rest (a bit) easier. The Journal is suggesting that last week’s sell-off could be short-lived, but warns that the dumping of developed market government debt will probably have a negative impact on EM offerings. (This, we remind you, comes as Egypt hits the road with its eurobond offering.) Either way, Reuters’ Friday global markets wrap-up makes for very ugly reading. Into the fray wades Mohamed El Erian, who warns that it may not be time to “buy the dip,” writing: “Without a significant improvement in fundamentals, investors would be well-advised to remember that there is an impending limit to how much liquidity injections can protect markets from the underlying economic reality.” Either way, it probably won’t be pretty for EM equities when the Fed gets around to raising rates, as Bloomberg reminds us.