House Democrats Clear Path For $3.5trl Budget Bill While Markets Await Powell

Okay, very good morning. It's Wednesday the 25th of August. Hope you are well. And just a quick look to start off with the heat map from yesterday, and as you can see, it's pretty mixed across the S&P 500. In terms of the best performing sectors from yesterday, as we did see a moderately higher close on Wall Street, the S&P and the Dow were up around 1 to 2 tenths of 1%. The NASDAQ was up about a third of 1%. From a sector breakdown, energy down here, basic materials, consumer discretionary were generally the better performers. So a little bit more of calm restored over the COVID Delta situation at the moment, particularly in North America, because those types of sectors tend to perform better in a more positive economic environment. And obviously that would be contingent on continuous reopening of the, of the economy. However, overnight in Asia, things not quite so positive, but albeit downside was fairly contained. Chinese technology stocks stalled, traders kind of weighing the situation on the COVID Delta variant in the Far East, in, in Australasia. On the charts this morning, things are pretty quiet and sideways, as you would expect, as people really lock in and wait now for Jerome Powell, obviously the key speech, and looking for any hints on tapering on Friday. Probably the only notable move from the overnight session really was gold. And I don't see anything other than a technical break here in gold, which broke down here in the early overnight session through that low end, the bottom side of the range trade from Tuesday session. And it came in combination with generally a resurgent dollar at that time. The Dixie's backed off a little bit, uh, going into the European open. It's still up about 1/10th 1%, but just coming back to around flat. But that explains then why that move was somewhat exacerbated by that technical breakdown, and we saw it trade heavy over a fairly short period back on the bottom side of $1,800 now in the gold future. Otherwise, things are pretty much sideways across the board. So this briefing really shouldn't take me too long because it's not really a great deal going on, to be quite honest. And that then brings me to this. This was, um, a response to a tweet I did yesterday. So this is my tweet, and this is kind of a meme suggesting this is markets just waiting for, for Powell on Friday. And that provides then some pretty tricky trading conditions for a certain type of trader. Certainly if you're a little bit more of an activist, if you prefer market movement, and then these aren't really ideal conditions, particularly in a low volume period as well. And one of the traders responded to me yesterday saying, the last Jackson Hole week was my worst ever. And I know this guy, this is a guy that's traded for many years, and he said a week off has been in the diary for a while. I think that's a really good point to make, although some people obviously have an innate ability to be self-controlled and disciplined and perhaps can watch markets but stay sat on the sidelines and not get dragged in. Inappropriately to get involved in markets. But I think there's often a lot of buildup when it comes to these big events like Jackson Hole, and it's almost like it saturates their market attention. It becomes this self-fulfilling kind of big episode that people look for market volatility and subsequent movements. But if you think about it, you know, the world will live on, on the Monday after Powell speaks and the week after. And so on. So it's a tricky one because what it can lead to is a pretty testing week, a big, a big kind of firework display on Friday, which can often be very tricky to trade. And so I absolutely applaud this trader. I'm not saying that this is a decision that everyone needs to make, but just making that conscious, rational assessment and thinking, do you know what, I don't even need to get involved. The market will still be here. Tapering will still be a topic of discussion way after Powell speaks because you've got to talk about the composition, the initiation of when it starts, the speed of which it's going to be drawn down. So do you know what, I'll pick my battles and I'll live to fight another day. And so fair play. And you know, if you can get a week off in August as well, then I'm sure that will help balance your, your work and personal life as well to a certain degree. So I just thought I'd I'd point that out. In terms of news, as I said, it's very quiet. The only thing I'd say that's probably worth a note, um, is the fast act— fact that House Democrats have cleared a path toward passing the $3.5 trillion budget bill and infrastructure plan. If you remember the last couple of briefings, I've been talking about the ongoing stalemate that they've been seeing. Um, there's a few more details on my note that I issue via Twitter if you want to check it out about this particular article. But overall, I wouldn't say markets are reacting to this, but it's just another kind of supportive force to just keep us in this period of consolidation after the kind of upward moves that we saw at the beginning of the week in a number of these US indices, which are now kind of sat there in terms of NASDAQ and S&P at up around these record levels. Similarly, oil as well is kind of consolidating at this point in time after what has been a pretty steep recovery. On the daily chart, obviously, only back on Monday session we were tracking sub-$62. We're now back up to $68. So it's been a very aggressive rebound for crude oil. We've pretty much come back to that same trend line that we've been watching on the initial breakdown of price that we had around mid-August, now marking a bit of a cap to the upside of this pretty strong rally that we've had. So a little bit of a hiatus here, I think, is probably to be expected. And now perhaps, barring anything, any shocks or anything like that, we could well trade a much more tighter price range going into Friday session, when obviously what Powell might say could have a great influence on the US dollar and consequently on the price of oil. On the energy market, we have had the API crude oil inventory data overnight. The drawdown in the headline crude figure was a little bit less than was anticipated. So drawdown of $1.622 million, which is about half of what analysts were expecting. And then Cushing was a draw of just shy of $500,000. Gasoline just shy of a million. Distillates around $245,000 drawdown. Um, otherwise on the calendar, you've got German IFO coming out this morning. I'd probably keep a half an eye on that if you're trading things like the euro currency, for example, but I don't really see it moving the needle a great deal. The expectation there is for it to remain relatively unchanged from the prior month's reading. The range fairly tight as well in terms of what analysts are expecting from that data point. Otherwise then, we look further forward to the US afternoon where we've got durable goods. You get your Department of Energy oil inventory numbers as well coming out. And from a speaker perspective, you've got ECB's Degüindos speaking at a Spanish event from 9:30 this morning. Fixed income supply, $61 billion in a 5-year note auction out of the US is probably the main thing. Um, if you're keeping an eye on US earnings, maybe just being aware Salesforce are reporting. But that is it. So not going to talk any longer than what is necessary. Going to let you guys get on, have a good day. I was asked yesterday about are we going to be covering Jackson Hole. So All being well, I will cover that on the YouTube channel. So if you're watching us there, please hit that subscribe button, hit the bell icon, you'll be notified when we go live. So my intention will be to cover some of the US session on Friday. Otherwise, don't forget you can join one of our senior traders, Tim Duggan, as well, who has his own community trading live as well. Just drop a comment and I can give you more details. All right guys, take care, have a good day, and I'll catch you tomorrow.