Apple Closing In On A $3trl Market Cap

Okay, very good morning, Thursday, 9th of December. Hope you are well. And as you can see, I'm still at home, and it looks like that's going to be the case at least for the foreseeable future. And of course, that comes after confirmation from the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday that there's a renewed call to work from home if possible to curb the Omicron outbreak. That we're likely to see in the UK over the coming weeks into Christmas and New Year. So get you up to speed on that. We'll have a look a little bit about the charts and how market sentiment resides this morning, talk about Chinese inflation, and I want to talk a little bit about Apple as well, which are closing in on a historic $3 trillion market cap and some of the rationale behind that stock price. And then I want to know what you guys think about who are going to be the long-term winners in the tech titan space. Before I go on though, don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you're new. Daily updates from myself and the rest of the team ongoing all the way through into Christmas. So I'd love to have you as part of the community. But let's get straight to it and let's have a look at the charts this morning. And yeah, pretty quiet overall. Equity index futures are pretty much locked in a, in a sideways pattern. You can see here in the center, NASDAQ 100, the S&P 500 futures after recovery and the whipsaw price action we had seen over Omicron. Things have kind of steadied out, and I think you would expect that to be the case because now it's a wait and see for the US inflation metrics. We'll get CPI tomorrow, which is one of the biggest events of the week. Um, in terms of the close on Wall Street, we did manage to eke out some gains. S&P up 0.3%, the Dow 0.1%, the NASDAQ slightly outperforming once again, up 0.64%. In fact, for the S&P 500, although it's now relatively range-bound, If you take into account yesterday's session, the S&P is on track for its biggest 3-day rally in a year, in fact. Elsewhere, things kind of reflecting that same sentiment. The dollar's a touch firmer this morning and subsequently EURUSD and cable down a uniform amount. Let's just have a look at cable from a technical perspective. Then we'll talk about what Boris Johnson has done. So this, this area here was where some of the rumors started to circulate yesterday. I've put an ellipse around this price action here in sterling-dollar cable, um, on the premise that the Act Plan B was going to be actioned from the UK government, and obviously the subsequent impact that that would have on economic activity if that being the case, albeit the restrictions fairly moderate in comparison to some of the other lockdowns that we've seen in the past. Um, where we're trading at the moment, we can see obviously we've just eking out a bit of a low here of support around the 1.3190 type level. But definitely this is going to be a pair to watch as we go through the back end of the week, because if that US CPI number does come in hot, then that's only going to fuel the kind of feelings around the hawkish pivot we've seen from the Fed. And although they themselves will need to contemplate the best course of action with Omicron yet to really emerge in the US, the disconnect, if you like, on timing with the actions now being taken in the UK might mean then that they could exert some further downside pressure here in cable. And on the daily continuation chart This is what cable looks like on a much more bigger time frame. So right here on the left, this biggest movement here was when we saw the initial onset of the pandemic and obviously a flight to quality into the US dollar during the initial sharp market reactions we saw through March of 2020. And if you actually look where we're technically trading at the moment, quite a key level here around 132 has been a key level of resistance and support, and it's the lowest levels we've traded now in sterling um, for about a year in terms of price activity. So let's talk about a little bit what happened yesterday. And yeah, Boris Johnson issues work from home guidance to curb Omicron outbreak. Here's Plan B: starting Monday is when the work from home, if you can, is to commence. Starting Friday, masks to be compulsory in most public indoor venues. In a week's time, NHS COVID pass mandatory for large entry. For entry into large venues. And so all of this is kind of a stepstone approach and can be more intensified going forward. But this is kind of the first step to take. A lot of people— and a word you might have read this morning is a dead cat strategy. And what that is basically referring to is Boris Johnson at the moment is under immense pressure, given a number of different things, but namely the most latest one about this whole debacle around the Christmas party that potentially was held this time last year, which would have gone against the own government guidelines. And so what a dead cat analogy refers to is you make a big enough scene over here that it distracts and deflects then the optics onto something else. And so hence the rationale why perhaps a lot of people say that, that he's taken what otherwise is quite uncharacteristically assertive action to initiate Plan B. Now, regardless of that fact, there definitely are a couple of things to be aware of. So I'll talk about why the government's taking this decision, then I'll talk about the market impact quickly. Um, one of the main things here is that yesterday there was an emergency meeting by SAGE, which obviously feeds into then government cabinet ministers about their recommendations, and they warned ministers that Omicron hospital admissions could breach 1,000 a day by the end of the year without tougher restrictions. The idea being here, as the government was saying yesterday in their press conference, that the Omicron variant is doubling basically every 2 to 3 days, which is much more aggressive than what we've seen with Delta, for example, of which at the moment is the most dominant strain that we have in the UK. The point being is, is that COVID cases at the moment have been going up around 20% over the last 7-day rolling average We're up there pretty much at the double peak that we saw in late summer, early autumn in the UK, and that's predominantly Delta. So if you plug on top of that then Omicron, which is expected to accelerate sharply over the coming weeks, then hence the rationale then that although this might be more mild in terms of its symptoms, if the number is big enough, then the proportionate amount of people that are likely to require ICU and hospital treatment is likely to go up. And that hospital pressure is already at a heightened state already on Delta and also going into the seasonal colder period of the year in general. So this is what the, the kind of rationale is. There's another study that's come out overnight and it suggests then the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is 4.2 times more transmissible in its early stage than Delta. And this is the latest study now from a Japanese scientist who analyzed the genome data of South Africans and is an advisor to the South African government. Now, what does this really mean for markets? Well, there's been a number of banks, Goldman Sachs the latest overnight, they've pushed back their UK, UK rate hike forecast. A lot of these big Wall Street banks were anticipating a rate hike mainly due to the moderate impact, if any, that furlough ending has had on the labor market. In combination with heightened inflation and a direction of travel as likely higher for price pressures, meaning that the Bank of England were going to hike rates sooner rather than later, i.e., priced for December, which is actually next week when they meet. However, given the Omicron situation now, all these banks are pivoting away and now refocusing to February 2022 for a mark— for a rate hike from the Bank of England. So Goldman's have now followed JP Morgan, and there's been lots of others doing the same. And so taken a bit of a heat out of that aggressive kind of policy normalization that was being priced in only around a month or so ago. But again, if you've been following the channel, that's not too dissimilar from what our opinion has always been, because the greatest tail risk here has always been associated with developments on, on COVID-19. All right, we'll move on and we'll talk about China. Overnight we had some inflation metrics. PPI came in at 12.9%. That was a above the expected 12.4%. That's the black line here you can see on the chart. And Chinese CPI, Consumer Price Index, for year-on-year November came in at 2.3%, actually slightly below the expected 2.5%. Factory inflation moderated then from the prior month, which was actually indeed a 26-year high in China. The slowdown providing some more room for policymakers then to support the economy. We've seen that earlier this week with the PBOC choosing to cut the reserve requirement ratio. And consumer inflation sped up, as you can see here, the uptick, albeit at a slow, slightly slower pace than analysts were anticipating, but nonetheless it has intensified. Much of that pickup is due to expensive food. When you break it down, vegetable prices actually jumped nearly 31% on the month, although wholesale prices have already started to come down, which meaning that perhaps just a temporary blip there going forward. All in all, I don't think this really means a great deal for markets, certainly in the short term this morning. One thing is, is that probably the producer price number coming off is a slight relief for the authorities there. They have made lots of coordinated efforts, obviously, to offset some of the supply kind of price pressures by flooding the market with various different commodity prices as well to alleviate that, that that burden, and that's paying heed. But just one data point, it's probably too early to tell the pattern at this point in time. The other thing then briefly mentioned was Apple, um, and this is just from a single stock perspective and a bit of commentary. And it's because the headlines are suggesting then Apple is nearly at $3 trillion in market cap. To give you a bit of context then, what does $3 trillion look like? Well, for the stock price This is looking at Apple shares over the course of the last 5 years, and the circles here that you can see is when Apple have hit $1 trillion, $2 trillion, and the course here then on to $3 trillion. And yeah, quite phenomenal because that would be bigger than the entire German major equity stock index, all the companies put together in terms of their market cap, just this one company. So they've got about another 6% to rise in order to achieve that, that meaningful milestone. A couple of things then. For one, 4 of the 10 most active options contracts on US exchanges on Tuesday were calls on the iPhone maker. And we have seen that it's almost like a lot of the option activity had obviously been centered on a lot of vogue names like Tesla sees incredibly high ones, but also a lot of those small market cap stocks where people are looking for big gains on the tail— coattails of the whole meme stock euphoria that we were seeing a year or so ago. But they've pivoted now and they have been targeting Apple, and it's been quite interesting to watch more activity on that more speculative side on potential price rises. We've also had earlier— I think it was yesterday or day before's previous briefing, I was talking about Morgan Stanley— they've raised their price target on Apple to $200 a share. From $164. And some of the things they're talking about is arguing that new products from Apple, particularly around the augmented reality space— that's quite hot at the moment, obviously, with a lot of conversation about Web3 and the metaverse and so on— and also their self-driving cars. And, and what MS is suggesting is that none of that really is baked into the price at this present point in time. So it's got further north to travel. Question for you guys then, I'd like to get some comments please on the video, is here is a snapshot of the tech titans. So some of the US companies that dominate, the most valuable in the world, and Apple top of the pile at the moment. But the question I want to ask you is, if you had to invest in one company over the next 10 years and you can choose Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Saudi Aramco, Amazon, or Tesla, 10-year hold, which one would you pick and why? So hit me up on the comments below and let me know what you think, uh, and I'll let you know what I think in the comments as well. Um, cool. The other thing here then is about one piece that I would note is this, and this isn't a big deal, just because I'm talking about Apple, I thought it was worth mentioning. Is that the self-driving car project for Apple, they've lost another 3 key engineers. And it seems pretty much whenever I look into Apple's car development in, in this whole EV space at the moment, um, ears and self-driving cars, it seems like every time I look, they're losing key project leaders or engineers. And so can, can Apple deliver on this car project? I don't know. I don't think that they can in isolation as a firm on themselves without really teaming up with someone else or amalgamating with some other existing auto manufacturer. So yeah, interesting to see that obviously MS were quite bullish on the idea that at some point they'll launch a fully autonomous car as early as 2025. I'm going to put my neck on the block and say they won't do it by 2025. Let's see if I'm right or wrong. Looking at the day ahead, we've already had the Chinese data. Let's have a look then at what else. It's a really quiet, actually, UK European morning. US jobless claims coming out at 1:30. The overall day is super quiet. You've got a 30-year bond auction from the US later this afternoon, but could be one of those days where markets respect the relative ranges that we're in. So technical levels might play greater influence to just constrain some of the short-term price activity intraday. A lot of market anticipation obviously for tomorrow and the US CPI figure. That's it for me for the time being. Hope you're well and I will catch you tomorrow. Thanks very much.