Open trading account 
Forget about the NASDAQ trading suspension. The big story these days is emerging markets. During a slow summer week, attention turned away from the US and towards India, Indonesia, Turkey and Brazil. These once-sizzling markets are suffering large currency declines, which have prompted many of their central banks to announce intervention efforts to prop them up.
Guess who’s to blame for the foreign fiasco? Yes, the US central bank chief Ben Bernanke is the goat once again. Emerging markets had been big beneficiaries of the Fed’s low interest rate policies since the financial crisis, as yield-hungry investors sought better opportunities than the zero percent US environment. So in May, when Bernanke said that the Fed might taper its bond purchases, it also meant that many of those emerging market investors would yank their funds and return to the US.
Indeed, many have had enough of the international roller coaster. According to an article in Wall Street Journal, since the beginning of June, retail investors have withdrawn $18.1 billion dollars from emerging market bond funds, about one-third of the amount they had put in since the era of low interest rates began with the financial crisis. Adding to the pain, institutional investors have pulled about 10 percent of their pre-crisis investments. The anxiety is seeping into all global markets. Last week, stock exchange-traded funds and global equity funds saw their first net outflows in eight weeks and the largest in five years.
It’s unlikely we will have much clarity to the primary issue facing markets in the near future: when and by how much will the U.S. Federal Reserve slow its accommodative monetary policy.
The mixed signals create a double-edged sword. While the stimulus has fueled the market's solid gains in 2013, for the Fed to continue its cheap money policy would signal the economy is too weak to advance without intervention.
Chances are, the nerves will persist until the Fed pulls the taper trigger, perhaps as early as the mid-September meeting. Until then, investors will keep an eye on the Durable Goods Orders report and the first revision to Q2 GDP, which most expect to increase to 2.2 percent from the originally-reported 1.7 percent. The strengthening economy would help the Fed’s case for tapering sooner rather than later.