Chinese Economy Shows More Signs Of Weakness

All right, very good morning. It is Wednesday the 15th of September and the day has arrived. I've mentioned it a few times, but Amplify Me, our new Amplify mission, launches today. So just go to AmplifyMe.com, you can check out the new website here. So if you're a student, whether school, college, or university, and you're trying to find out what role in finance you want to do, whether it be sales, trading, asset management, market making, quant trading, this is the place to go. And so the reason why is you can take part in a free simulation using our latest tech that gets used by all of the big banks to identify your performance, with the potential then to be fast-tracked for big financial institutions. So go check that out, it goes live today. There's some more information as well about the technology and our mission and the the students who've taken part in this already, having had a— well over 100,000 people have done this simulation exercise. Also as well, if you're interested, on that homepage, if you're just a trader and you want to stay in touch with me and with markets, I now will be putting out, as of the end of this week, a Market Maker daily newsletter. Well, I'll be aiming to give just a 3-minute breakdown of markets each day with the objective of helping you, you guys learn just one extra thing every day so you can get better about your understanding of markets and also hopefully your ability to, to trade as well. And this will be linked then up to the podcast, which of course we've been doing for a while now as well. And when you log in, this is the new platform, what it will look like. All of this is completely free, so no reason at all not to, not to sign up to it on AmplifyMe.com. When you're logged in, then you'll get the latest videos that I put out on YouTube, latest podcast. You can also then start clicking into different areas here, which say market analysis, for example. I was doing an analysis on the US CPI print after it came out yesterday, just explaining why the market did what it did, how to interpret these numbers, this sort of thing. So yeah, quite a cool dashboard there, accessing lots of different types of free content as well. Definitely worth checking out when you get time. But let's get straight into it and let's talk about what exactly is going on in markets this morning. And first off, the overall broader sentiment is relatively quiet this morning. Obviously, the big thing that came out yesterday was the US CPI print, which we can briefly summarize. But you can see here the US 10-year down on the bottom right really saw an injection of pace as yields decline quite rapidly on the back of the fact that Team Transitory gets a US inflation win. By no means are we out of the woods yet in terms of higher prices in general, but CPI rose by less than forecast, 0.3% in July, restrained by declines in used cars that turned negative for the first time since 2016. Remember, that was the real sweet spot that was elevating price pressures in the US in kind of the April, May, June period. Airfares, auto insurance also declined. Those categories, as I said, have been instrumental in lifting CPI prints over recent months. And annual inflation was 5.3%, down from the pandemic peak seen 2 months earlier as well. So that in itself was really the, the major move from yesterday. Equities originally rallied but then pulled back and was more a case, I think, of more conforming to the overall broader trend lower that we've been seeing in US equities over the course of the last week or so, rather than anything really sustained too much on the back of the CPI report. Because even though that number was lower, inflation might be transitory, that doesn't detract from the point that that taper decision is still looming in the near term. Gold though did remain elevated, as you can see here in the top right. So initially the dollar dipped um, albeit that that was reversed pretty quickly in the greenback for the aforementioned reason of why equities as well kind of reversed course. But gold remained up, getting again a bit of a kickstart from trading around the $1,783 mark and trading now and still consolidating above the $1,800 handle in gold futures this morning. So a few things I wanted to talk about. First off, I guess overall in Asia, there are a few things to, to be aware of. I'm going to flip over my chart to here. So overall, the broader region shares retreated in Japan and Hong Kong and fluctuated in China. The latest steps to, to try and contain the COVID-19 outbreak are still in focus. On the regulatory front, what we've seen now is Macau casino stocks slid on steps to boost oversight in that particular particular area. The latest escalation then on this regulatory overhaul that China are trying to implement. The next one as well, or area that people are talking about, is China's cosmetic surgery industry. I think it's worth about $50 billion or so a year. It's the next on regulators' kind of hit list to just watch out for. Any associated names to that domestically came under quite heavy selling pressure in the local market overnight. But ultimately, one of the main things was in the APAC session, China really continuing to see a slowdown on all facets of its economy at the moment. And the latest was a sharp slowdown in retail sales growth as virus curbs have really hit consumer spending and travel during the peak summer holiday period. I don't think this was too unexpected, but again, it did come out quite a bit weaker than expected. So here's just a quick look at, uh, on the actual chart. Just make it a bit smaller so you can see it. Uh, the red line is Chinese retail sales, the black line industrial output. So retail sales for August year on year came in at 2.5%. That's well below expectations of 7%, and obviously it's a much sharper decrease from what we were seeing around 8% in the prior month, whereas IP came in at 5.3%, below the expected 5.8%, and a slowdown from from the prior 6.4%. Many economists are expecting the PBOC will continue to cut the reserve requirement ratio for banks again in the coming months following that surprise decision to do so that was only back in July. So something to just be aware of. China obviously facing quite a few different challenges at the moment. The economic kind of general slowdown, the COVID-19 outbreak still being seen, and as I was talking about yesterday, new outbreaks still being identified at the moment. Then the other thing you might have heard about a lot is a company, a property developer called Evergrande Group, which is one of the world's most indebted companies, but it's potentially a systemic risk for China domestically. To understand that more, just go check out the AmplifyMe YouTube channel. Eddie and I put out a video which you can locate here under latest videos. It's the last one that came out. And Eddie has a really great short 7-minute explainer basically of, of what, who are Evergrande, why are they a risk, how did they end up in this situation, and what might happen next. So a really great listen when you get 2 minutes. Otherwise, wrapping up the region, North Korea fired a pair of ballistic missiles off its east coast, South Korea's Joint Chief of Staff said overnight. Comes a day after testing long-range cruise missiles. So continue to ratchet that up. And that latest activity we are seeing on the Korean Peninsula is pretty much the first that we've had in several months. So it's kind of a meaningful shift to test again Biden's resolve in that region. And Biden's really had a bit of a tough time of it as yet, certainly with the messy withdrawal of Afghanistan, the struggles he's seeing on Capitol Hill to push through his $3.5 trillion spending plan at the moment. With the debt ceiling looming and his popularity has been decreasing. And so be interested to see how he really deals with that. In somewhat context, it comes after as well US President Joe Biden had denied last night a report that his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping last week turned down an offer from Biden for a face-to-face meeting. If you remember, this came after the first telephone call that they'd had in several months since going back to February. In that 90-minute phone call at the end of last week. So tension still remaining fairly tense there at the moment, and we're just keeping half an eye on, although albeit not really too much of a factor for the open this morning. From a single stock perspective, there's a couple of things I guess I can update you on, you should be aware of. Just wrapping up Apple, they had that California streaming event last night where they unveiled a couple of new products. So they launched the new iPhone 13 with camera chip and screen upgrades All of that was pretty much as expected. An interesting thing was they've made a bit of an expansion to their Fitness+ service, and that saw subsequent competitors come under some pressure, Peloton being a particular one. They were down nearly 3.5% on the kind of heating up of competition within that online space. Apple shares themselves actually declined after the event and fell nearly 2%. This, as I mentioned yesterday, is not unusual. All of the announcements really that come out at these events, these product announcements from Apple, are very well telegraphed. You tend to see a bid into the event and then profit-taking in a buy the rumor, sell the fact type fashion. And that was exactly what happened yesterday. The more kind of muted iPhone upgrade here, design-wise it hasn't changed, it's more under the bonnet things that, that are different. There's also a vague release date for for the Apple Watch, given some of the production snags that we're seeing at the moment due to the pandemic manufacturing constraints were also seen as a bit of a headwind. The presentation lacked any update on the Apple iPods. Remember, we were looking for an iPod 3 announcement about a more cheaper but pro-looking pod for headphones that didn't materialize, but that's said to be coming in due course. Um, and they did unveil a revamp of their iPad Mini and iPad Pro-like design. Uh, again, very subtle tweaks— thinner bezels, larger displays, better chip, these sorts of things. The other company as well that was unscheduled that made an announcement in the mega-cap space was Microsoft. As you can see by the headline here, they've announced an up to $60 billion share repurchase program, and they've raised their quarterly dividend by 11%. This came out after market. Their shares traded up about a percent in extended hours trade. Um, on the energy front, uh, we have had the API crude oil inventories last night. Not too much in the way of any real reaction here overall, but we did have a bullish headline reading of drawdown of 5.437 million, a little bit deeper than analysts were expecting of 3.5 million. Cushing draw 1.345, gasoline 2.6 7, 6, 1. Um, elsewhere, a few things then on the energy front. For one, we're still tracking Tropical Depression Nicholas, which is at the moment making landfall. Heavy rainfall will impact areas across southern central Louisiana, southern Mississippi, um, going forward. The storm surge inundation along the coast of upper Texas and southwestern Louisiana though will start to diminish later on today is what the National Hurricane Center are forecasting. But that doesn't mean that wind gusts to tropical storm force are possible for a few hours along portions of Louisiana and the upper Texas coast, which again, as I said yesterday, is impeding a little bit of that specific area still getting back online post-Hurricane Ida, which was much more intense and caused much more disruption. But this just delaying those effects to try and get back to normality. Crude oil this morning still a little bit higher, but generally within a near-term range defined by really 70 on the downside, 71.14 on the upside, and we're trading around the close proximity to the upper bound of that at the moment. Calendar-wise for today, we've had some UK CPI data out this morning, and actually, uh, fairly interesting, um, the CPI number did come out a little bit higher than expected. Expected 3.2% versus expected 2.9%. Very minor uptick in the pound. Probably explain why that hasn't just run away to the upside by the fact that the Bank of England have telegraphed quite clearly that this is likely to be the case— short-term inflationary pressures before the transitory effect starts to kick in. So although it's higher than expected, it's not entirely unexpected, um, as far as the Bank of England are concerned. And so therefore it means markets quite calm in terms of how the Bank of England will rationalize these inflationary pressures in the UK. Otherwise, going further forward into the afternoon, um, from a stateside point of view, we've got New York Fed manufacturing at 1:30 with import-export prices. You've got Canadian CPI data for August as well coming out in the afternoon. US IP comes out at industrial production at 2:15, and then you'll get the DOE oil inventories usual time at 3:30 later on this afternoon. For speakers' perspective, European Commission President von der Leyen is speaking, giving her annual State of the Union address to European Parliament, 8 AM. And in the afternoon, Bank of Japan Governor Kuroda speaks at 1:20, and then Eastbee speakers Schnabel and Chief Economist Philip Lane speak at 1:30 and 4 o'clock respectively. Supply coming out the UK this morning, And then that is it. So again, don't forget to check out— I think you see the logo here— AmplifyMe.com. New platform launch happening today. I know there's a number of our summer analysts who we've been dealing with virtually through the summer who are going to be meeting at a launch event tonight. So I look forward to seeing you there. And for everyone else, take care. Any questions, let me know, and I will catch you guys tomorrow. Alright, take care.