Late Sell-Off On Virus Concerns

Okay, very good morning. Hope you're doing well. My name is Anthony Cheung. I'm the head of market analysis here at Amplify Trading. Check out the website link if you want more information about us, what we do, how we trade, our trader development programs, and so on. Also, as well, just as a heads up, please please do like and subscribe to the channel. Back by popular demand, Sam North, who you probably remember— his hair's about this big and he's got a beard like that nowadays— but he's going to be back on the weekend. And every Sunday he's going to be doing a more technical-focused and trade setup-related video on a Sunday for the week ahead. So hopefully that's going to be a nice addition to generally what we do. I mean, obviously me and Sam not together physically in the same space and probably unlikely to be so on the trading floor in London for some time, but you'll get that on a Sunday. And obviously Eddie as well, giving it a different mix, looking at some of the hot topics in a little bit more detail, is going to be on a Saturday as well. So hopefully you get real value out of the channel. So any comments, of course, feel free to always leave a comment and I'll reply to you straight away. But let's look at the markets then for this morning, and starting off, I guess, with this graphic right here. This is looking at the S&P 500, the Dow, the Nasdaq Composite, looking at the daily changes. And as you can see here, all three major indices finishing in the red yesterday and actually posting the worst day since the first of the month. Two real different things here: concerns about the second wave of coronavirus infections as we go through this period of the loosening of these measures, particularly as we discussed here yesterday, the German kind of R rate back above 1. The South Korea new outbreak led by a particular individual visiting 3 nightclubs, which then might have then consequently infected or at least exposed multiple thousands of people. And then also in Wuhan, there's been a very small outbreak in a specific tower block, but they're going to test the entire 11 million population of the city. Not only that, there was also a leading US infectious disease expert speaking in Congress yesterday and warned lawmakers that premature lifting of lockdowns could lead to additional outbreaks of the coronavirus. This is specifically talking about the US, of course, and that made people a bit nervous. That, and of course, in addition to the ongoing kind of pressures mounting on the trade war side, efforts in the Senate to impose new sanctions on China not helping either. And if I just zoom into the S&P chart here, to have a look in a bit more detail, probably make a little bit more sense of the general narrative in markets that we've had that's been driving some of this equity index movement. And so this is looking at the month of May. I marked this up just to make a few things quite clear. This is when we had the initial criticism of China by Trump. He's obviously changed his tune, flip-flopped a few times We then had quite a big push-up on more positive developments on that front, but also as well in the back end of last week, Thursday, kind of Friday, that federal funds rate futures pricing and the potential for negative rates and market kind of taking heed or support from the back of that. We then had payrolls come out and obviously economically pretty disastrous, but all in all, not perhaps as bad as some might have feared, and we rallied into the end of last week. That kind of really has defined the top of the recent move that we've had in May. And then last night we really started to come under some severe selling pressure right into the close, and then for about half an hour in the aftermarket trade in the futures market. And there wasn't really one singular catalyst. As I've said, it's kind of a dual-fold thing of just generally people a bit panicked by the potential significance of a second wave of infections. That again, the catalyst perhaps was that infectious disease expert speaking to lawmakers in the US yesterday. That with the China tensions, we just broke down technically as well. It started to get quite heavy when we broke that key level we were looking at this time yesterday, which was those respective lows was holding up the price action so far this week, and also some resistance points from last week. And then it really was quite an assault on markets into the close. And then we dipped further, got in toward then the lows that were seen back on what would have been Wednesday going into Thursday night last week. We have had a bit of a bounce. There's not really been much in the way of any reason for the bounce, to be honest. I'll run through the headlines shortly, but whenever you get a quite pronounced and a fairly quick move like that without really any new definitive one headline driving the price, just generally deterioration of sentiment into the close, then a little bit of, you know, just closing out of those, those very speculative short-term shorts just naturally sees a bit of a bounce in markets. And as we do bounce back up, uh, obviously we'll just be keeping an eye on this kind of area here. So just ahead of the, the pivot, you've got the 382 retracement of that high to the low which we had generally in yesterday's session, or to the Asia-Pacific low, which comes in at around the same point as to the levels that were seen on the support on the evening of last Thursday on the 7th. So any further movement upwards, I'll be looking at that as a pretty strong area of resistance. But all in all, yeah, a quite aggressive sell-off. I wouldn't over-interpret that just thinking we're going to sell off again today. Perhaps that might be the case, perhaps not. I think the bounce this morning though is not based on any real fundamental developments. It's just a natural retracement of the overstretched short-term move that we had last night. But let's have a look at a few different things. There's certainly some things to talk about. And going to start off then with talking of coronavirus, an update generally of what's going on. And, you know, like this time yesterday, we were talking about Russia being the kind of new area of an outbreak in geographically and they went from 4th to now 2nd in terms of the confirmed case table. They're now only sitting behind the US, which is obviously way out in front in terms of those numbers. Um, looking elsewhere then, there are a couple of interesting things that I saw last night that I thought I would talk over what I was tweeting in case you hadn't seen it. But I saw Bernstein came out with a piece of research Obviously everyone's trying to understand this kind of— as in the UK, Boris Johnson continues to talk about this R rating, and you know, they can only start to loosen measures when it is consistently below 1, this figure being representative of the kind of the compounding nature of what happens then if it's above that. The multiple chances are that even just above it could see extreme growth in numbers of the virus spreading. And Bernstein basically have said that they believe multiple US states will struggle with further relaxing requirements as disease trends start heading the wrong way. Their model that they've run for the pandemic suggests that even moderately elevated R equaling 1.05 would see cases double every 6 weeks. And here then lies a bit of a problem, because as we know, in America, Trump And I guess tactfully so, has rather than taken full ownership and responsibility, he kind of delegated that to state governors to make those decisions. Um, from the administration, they could purely put out recommendations, but obviously there is some political nuances involved with that where he's going to be putting pressure on, um, likes of certain Republican candidates to be doing certain things We saw yesterday he was very much backing up Tesla's Elon Musk that they should reopen factories even though that would be going against what the current rules are within that particular area. But what's Trump got to lose when you're talking about an area that's democratic in that sense? Because he knows that he can just say all these things where he has pretty much zero accountability in that sense. What's interesting here then are a few different things. And this is looking at workers in toss-up states among the hardest hit by COVID-19 lockdowns. What we're looking at here are areas like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Georgia, Washington, Nevada. Quite a few of these typically are, are what we call toss-up states. For those not familiar with that terminology, basically meaning that, you know, it's a very close call, they could swing either way in an upcoming presidential election. That being said then, what can you expect from Trump? Well, he's going to be absolutely doing his road show. I think, I believe he's in Pennsylvania this evening, and so he'll be trying to drum up support in these particular areas. You know, this is where the campaign funding gets focused. You know, they know that there's certain deep red states, they don't need to focus on those, they need to focus on ones that could potentially tip the balance. Here then is looking at certain swing state counties will have deep GDP losses basically in Q2. Texas, Florida, these are of course big ones. Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and so on. The biggest then carrying votes would be Texas and Florida. Texas counties that rely heavily on, on oil will certainly suffer greatly just given some of the price movement we've had in WTI crude. But hence the reason why then Trump, if you remember about 4 weeks ago, was so adamant about using further funding to help that particular industry. You know, the more so that he can do that, the more favorable he'll be perceived in that he's taken definitive action to try and safeguard that particular region. And why would he do that? Well, he knows that they're particularly important politically for his fate in terms of what it plays out in a few months' time in the election. The other things then here are this. This is RealClearPolitics, otherwise known as RCP. Again, for anyone in the UK, you might not have heard of this website before. If in the US, you're probably more than familiar with it, but this is a website that will be scrutinized and looked at much more frequently as we go further forward in the months to come and we start to get closer to the election. Basically, if I just go back to the homepage, this is basically your hub for all things related to US politics. It has basically every single major story that's related to anything to do with US politics. So it scours and aggregates everything from Politico, Washington Post, The Spectator, Bloomberg, The Hill, NBC News, so on and so forth. And it breaks it down into certain different subject matter And what I'm looking at this morning is you can track then poll averages for these different swing states. So it's obviously quite interesting to see how things are playing out at the moment. So in an area, like I said, Trump speaking in Pennsylvania later, that's one of the strongholds according to the polls at the moment where Biden does have a decisive lead at the moment. Then what they have at the top here is an RCP national average, and if I click on that you can see then this is kind of what we would have in the UK as the poll of polls, aggregating then the averages, and it gives you then a generalized score where you can see Biden at the moment is up 4.4 points over Trump. Interestingly though, here in the polls Biden's up, but then if we go back and if we just go back to the election 2020 section, if you go to the betting odds tells a bit of a different story. Trump up by 8, and we all know that the bookies tend to be the ones in the know. And yeah, I still at this point, um, not sure whether or not Biden's got what it takes without a further mismanagement, let's say, of a significant outbreak and second wave virus in the US. I think it's the, the one thing that could bring Trump down. Other than that, it's more a mistake on that front rather than Biden just steaming ahead. And I think that's pretty much reflected in the bookies' price at the moment. Now obviously the, the temptation for Trump here and the real risk is that in his push to try and reopen the economy and, and kind of resuscitate the US economy back on its feet given the the dire situation at the moment is that could he just be going too soon, too fast? I mean, that's certainly what that US infectious disease expert said to lawmakers yesterday on Capitol Hill. And so that's a problem, um, and potentially for him. So absolutely quite fascinating to watch this unfolding at the moment. Um, obviously this is talking much more bigger picture over the coming months, but these are the types of things that I think you're going to need to start tracking going forward. What else is happening? Well, Congress— there's been a few different things. Democrats in Congress have released a plan for $3 trillion in new stimulus spending that would help state and local governments through the coronavirus crisis, unveiled after governors in large US states like New York and California warned essential services could be curtailed without any funding forthcoming. Democratic proposals were drafted without input from Republicans, so as you can imagine, their demands for extra funding for certain states, particularly when it comes to New York and California, are going to be highly contested and a real sticking point. Trump has suggested hard-hit states, so he's basically inferring the state of New York, which of course is an area, as well as with California, He's going to pin that on being mismanaged by Democratic governors, of course, you know. So the real political gamesmanship begins at this point, and he will suggest then that as such, that's not his fault, and therefore they do not deserve any type of federal help. Um, when push comes to shove though, there's a bigger national picture, of course, that the administration needs to manage for the moment. And unemployment, of course, we saw last Friday topped out at this 14.7% reading. So action does certainly need to happen. So it's just the point here that this was fully written by Democrats and obviously assists in those certain areas where Trump will want to make a point out of, as I just said, that it was a Democratic issue that's led to that, even though it's— we know that's not necessarily the case because New York just happens to be a highly cosmopolitan and densely populated urban area. In terms of New York City, of course, which is kind of heart of the outbreak in that area. This comes, of course, with Congress already appropriating nearly $3 trillion in economic relief since the start of the outbreak. So these are just whopping numbers on the fiscal side, and certainly this then does lead us on quite nicely as to what Powell is likely to be requesting when he delivers his speech a bit later on today. On that front then, let's talk about Jerome Powell. This is kind of one of the main events of certainly today, but obviously this week as well. And it comes in the context of what we've had of that, that whole talk about conversation of negative rates in the US. And as much as that's been downplayed by a number of Federal Reserve officials going into this speech, this speech is happening at 2 o'clock London time He's likely to push back on this idea. I don't think that will come as a great deal of surprise, reinforcing his willingness though to continue using balance sheet tools, leaning on fiscal policy to really help support the monetary moves they've already made in taking rates down to zero and restarting QE and various other liquidity-inducing measures that they've, they've put into place. What a couple of people are looking at is potential for what we call yield curve control policy. Now, this has been adopted by other central banks. That would entail the central bank basically setting a target for yields on longer-term Treasury securities in addition to its overnight benchmark and buying and selling Treasuries in order to hit that target. The Fed has already been buying lots of Treasuries since mid-March. It's actually added about $1.5 trillion to its balance sheet. Um, the initially the rationale was to just help restore liquidity whilst we were going through that big episode of market volatility through, um, the main bit of March. But now as market functions have improved, the Fed will probably continue to buy with the aim of keeping long-term yields generally low, and that in itself being then targeted and supportive then of the economy in a slightly different fashion to complement all the other tools that are ongoing at the moment. The other thing, of course, is, um, forward guidance. Forward guidance, of course, is one of those less, I guess, tangible real policy tools, but arguably the most important one because it carries such ability to shape market expectations about the future. And if you can really harness and control that, you can really start to support the market in a way that doesn't necessarily need an action like a negative rate, which obviously starts to put you down a certain path and, and also starts to diminish your policy responses in future should you need to turn to them. So here, the central bank's current guidance, if I just read it out to you, is that benchmark rate will remain pinned near zero until it is confident that the economy has weathered recent events and is on track to achieve its maximum employment and price stability goals. And so, yeah, some people, uh, insinuating towards, have they got to be a little bit more specific? Has there got to be certain more concrete kind of posts that they can see ahead of time that if hit will mean this type of action? I'm a little unsure of that. I think Mark Carney was a victim of being that specific with forward guidance when he first came into the Bank of England. And so I don't think Jerome Powell necessarily is going to go through that. So all in all, although this Powell speech will be very closely followed by markets, um, I don't think he's really going to say a great deal, to be honest, that we haven't already heard. So calling on lawmakers for additional fiscal relief, reiterating a lack of appetite to negative rates— I guess it's how far does he go in hinting towards could it be a possibility. Or what would it take in order for it to become a more credible possibility would be the way I'd kind of look at it. Of course, Trump yesterday, what was he saying about this whole negative rate situation? He was saying, of course, let's go, let's adopt negative rates like everyone else has done. Why aren't we doing it? And if you think about it from a Trump point of view, you know, again, this is him tactfully looking to protect himself in a sense that if the economy and Powell does what he wants, doesn't go negative, manages this pandemic period, Trump can say, "Yep, fine, that's what he's employed to do." But then if he fails, the markets come under severe pressure, well again, it's not the pandemic, it's not the death toll, it's Powell's fault. And it's Powell's fault because I told him to adopt negative interest rates. It doesn't matter whether or not that would have been the panacea, the solution here for whether or not this could have solved the issues. But that again means that Trump already has positioned himself appropriately that he can discount any accountability for that outcome. So you can see, you know, this is the way to sort of think about these things. Hopefully it makes sense. And that speech is going to be at 2 o'clock London time, so early in the morning in the States. Final things to talk about, we've got the RBNZ. They had their rate decision overnight. I'm not going to talk about this a great deal, just a summary. The New Zealand dollar, a little bit of pressure. The country basically boosted its asset purchase program, in fact they almost doubled it. They indicated their openness toward negative interest rates, so it really is the talk of the town at the moment. And then we had the oil inventory numbers from the API last night. Market not really buying into this at all. It's kind of— there's other things going on right now. But ahead of the DOE's, as a recap, we had a crude build of 7.6 million, bigger expected build, 16th weekly build in a row. Cushing saw its first drawdown though in 10 weeks. Cushing was a -2.216 million. Gasoline drawdown 1.9 to still build 4.7 million. But again, that Cushing number perhaps Interesting there, the first draw in 10 weeks. Calendar-wise, um, we've already had UK data. GDP's come out. What did that come out as? Let me just refresh you. It was the Q1— don't forget— preliminary GDP number. So the pound has had a moderate tick higher. We're back up to the pivot in cable futures, so off the Asia-Pacific lows. The number came in at -2%, expectations were for -2.5%. Um, so yeah, a little bit of sterling strength, but nothing outrageous. Don't forget that these are Q1 numbers, and everyone's obviously focused on, uh, the depths of how bad then Q2 is going to be, not so much backward looking back to Q1 where we already caught a very tail end of the initial lockdown and the pandemic kicking in at the end of March. Interestingly though, the UK deficit— and you probably read in UK press from Sunak going further and saying about the furloughing of workers for another multiple months— but the overall fiscal situation in the UK is going to be pretty, pretty hairy, to use lack of a better phrase. And that likelihood is going to mean at some point you can't get away from it. Some form of austerity in the form of higher taxes and all these types of things, you know, it's inevitable, I'm afraid. The government doesn't give away just free money for nothing. Someone's got to pay for it in the end of the day. So perhaps a little bit of reality coming home from these, these mammoth fiscal packages that are being unleashed at the moment. But I guess that's a— that's an issue for another point in time. I can't remember it from top of my head. I saw a fantastic phrase yesterday, someone talking about this, but the general takeaway is that, look, you know, when you're facing near death, you've got to take real action there and then. It's a necessity to remain alive, and so therefore you worry about the consequences later. And that very much so the case with governments and their racking up of their, their debt in that respect. Um, so other than that, uh, the UK data— you've now got a fairly quiet morning until you get into the swing of the US session. You've got PPI numbers, but again, Powell's going to be the main thing that people will be focusing on. If you ever did want to know a bit more detail about Fed speeches and so on, if you go on the Federal Reserve website, you basically go to News and Events, which is the second tab, go on to Calendar If I click on that, it gives you then the calendar for the month of May. You scroll down, obviously the 13th today, and you can see here Jerome Powell. So you can see the time he's speaking, and also you can access the live link then here for when he does go live later on today. Um, unclear yet— I've spoken to the Squawk guys— whether or not there's going to be any pre-prepared text. They do not have an answer to that at this point in time. I would say normally in this type of high-level event of this importance, there normally would be, which means that all the comments will come out simultaneous at the point of turning 9 AM local time or 2 o'clock in, in London. All right guys, that's it. Any questions, feel free to leave a comment, and I'll wish you guys a good day ahead. And for the guys on the advanced, on professional trading program, Sam and I will jump on a private call and we'll run through some of the technical setups for the day as well. All right, have a good day, guys.