Major Boost For Tech Giants After Facebook Ruling

Very good morning, it's Tuesday the 29th of June, so I hope you're doing well. And well done to Andy Murray getting his Wimbledon campaign up and running. A little bit tentative, only actually his third match win of the year, but he did knock out the number 28 seed. So good job, Andy, good to have you back. And And good luck to the England football team, obviously kicking off against Germany, um, later on tonight at 5 PM London time. And my money is on a penalty shootout, and so let's see how that goes. Um, little bit of data for you, obviously England have never beaten Germany in a penalty shootout in a major tournament, having lost in 1990 and 1996. Uh, and actually, as far as major tournament penalty shootouts go, I think that they've won 9 and lost 3. So again, let's, uh, let's hope and wish the boys well and get the job done tonight. But look, back, back onto markets and let's look at what we've got in front of us today. And fairly tame open again from a calendar perspective. It's very much really from tomorrow onwards when we start to get the kind of prelude to payrolls. So we start getting ADP and ISM and so on, jobless claims Thursday, the OPEC meeting on Thursday. So much of the calendar is centered around really the mid to second half of the week, and hence the reason why things are relatively quiet overall on the news front at the moment. But there's certainly a few things for me to talk about. Overall sentiment this morning, pretty flat. I mean, the Dixie is basically trading unchanged, and that's largely reflected in the major currency pairs, equity indices. Probably the one that's sticks out the most is the NASDAQ 100, and the reason for that is it outperformed on the close last night. Wall Street was up 1.25% comparative to a loss of nearly a half a percent in the Dow. So this is looking at the NASDAQ future performance yesterday, and if you put that on the daily chart, ever since we had that technical break of that nice pullback level to the previous, um, all-time high of that rising trend line the markets just continue to power, motor on to the upside as far as the tech space is concerned. On the heat map, one of the biggest gainers here, glowing the most green, of course, was Facebook shares. They finished the session up in excess of 4%, which is obviously a sizable move for a company of that magnitude in terms of size. And the reason there is they won a court ruling dismissing two monopoly lawsuits filed by the US government and a coalition of states to that sought to break up the company. And, and this, this deal is effectively a large blow to the effort of antitrust officials to take on some of these big tech platforms. And so as you can see here, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft all generally higher. Semiconductors as well having a really good day. NVIDIA up 5%, Intel up around 3% as well. Um, so overall the tech really was quite the outperformer. Otherwise, in other charts, oil has backed off from its recent run higher. And again, I don't really see anything too sinister behind that move. There's obviously a lot of people looking at potential for a renewed amount of supply to come back onto the market. That really is the talking point at the moment. And obviously, this is what Bloomberg are picking up and writing about. We had RBC analysts just gaining a bit of attention yesterday. They're forecasting around a 500,000 to 1,000,000 supply increase from the OPEC meeting later on this week. The market's kind of been leaning a little bit more on the 500K side. But in context, obviously, this is what oil looks like. We've had a pretty solid run really going over the course of the last month, and so a little bit of a pullback. And as you can see, just finding a bit of near-term support around the previous area that we initially ran out a bit of steam on the initial push in mid-June is now providing some support. So 72.40 area. But in context of this recent move, the actual intraday moves over the course of the last week or so of trading sessions actually just looks like we've just pulled back to the bottom end of what is effectively a trading range here at around that 72.46 kind of level. So At the moment, perhaps just to be a bit of readjustment going into expectations around that OPEC meeting, but nothing too dramatic that I would foresee that would really destabilize oil prices to cause downward or exert more downward pressure, to be honest. Otherwise, that's about it. Pretty, pretty quiet overall. I mean, index futures pretty flat. The Nasdaq futures underperforming a little bit overnight, but as to be expected given the stark outperformance from yesterday's session. And the DAX future up marginally around 14 ticks this morning. Last night after market, we did see the US bank stocks move higher in post-market trade, particularly that of Morgan Stanley, whose shares were up around 3% after the closing bell. So keep an eye on the financials later on today. Remember, we had the US Federal Reserve Bank stress test results, all 23 banks passing with flying colors last week, as you would anticipate, and as analysts were expecting then Straight away to start the week, US banks coming out and hiking dividends, and they're going to recommence buybacks. MS probably the standout in terms of the post-market moves. That's because they said they would double their dividend to 70 cents. Other banks weren't quite so aggressive. GS moved from $1.25, hiked it up to $2, and JP was only a 10-cent increase from 90 cents to a dollar. In terms of the buybacks for MS, they're going to increase it up to $12 billion from the previous $10 billion, so a $2 billion increase for them. So this news pretty much as expected, but again, confirmation of it did see some post-market trade higher in these, in these particular bank stocks. Other things to be aware of: Boris Johnson's government is preparing to lift all remaining coronavirus restrictions as per their previously agreed timetable on the 19th of July despite the Delta variant that we're seeing, which yesterday saw case rates hit their highest since basically the new year. Yesterday we were just shy of 23,000 cases. Um, a couple of stats to be aware of, I guess, that supports the government's rationale for just pushing ahead despite these lofty case numbers, and that's because more than 84% of UK adults now have at least one dose of the vaccine and nearly 62% of adults have had 2. And so at this present point in time, as we know, hospitalization rates and thankfully death counts are particularly low at this present point in time. So the government of the view that we can go ahead and unlock as per the schedule in a couple of weeks' time. But a situation we continue to monitor that hasn't really influenced the pound. Currency markets are pretty quiet this morning. All things remaining equal. Elsewhere on the vaccine front, sticking to a certain degree with, with COVID this came out yesterday, but in case you weren't aware of it, there was a report and a study from the University of Oxford suggesting that mixing of doses of COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and AstraZeneca actually creates a strong immune response. And for me, I actually think this is quite not an immediately obvious market impactful headline, but I do think it's definitely a positive move in the right direction for controlling of COVID on a more global scale, both in isolation for countries where we have, as we've seen, encountered supply kind of bottlenecks that has meant that vaccination rates have decelerated in certain areas. And so being able to then have an ability of diversification amongst available vaccines, I think then gives a, a good solution, particularly when we're confronted with a very transmissible virus like the Delta variant. And then for other undeveloped countries where they're still lagging quite a lot, it's kind of a case of what you can get your hands on the quickest is going to be a more optimal solution than waiting and being unprotected against various future mutations. So I think that is quite a big positive on the global level for COVID, and we shall see whether or not which countries adopt that strategy of mixing those particular vaccines going forward. On the COVID front as well, just to wrap up this kind of segment, do note that overnight, a little bit of weight in the Aussie currency in the FX space, and that's because Australia's Queensland state premier has imposed a 3-day COVID lockdown including the state state capital of Brisbane overnight. Uh, the Australian Premier McGowan announced that Perth and Peel will enter a 4-day lockdown as well overnight. Again, as they try to control this breakout ongoing at the moment. Again, the Delta variant is a global factor at this point in time. Now otherwise, quick look at the calendar and what's in store for the day ahead. And pretty quiet, as I've already mentioned. Um, as far as, yeah, UK nationwide house price data, it's not really a market mover, but for any of those interested in the home buying space, then that figure came in in line at 0.7% month on month. Um, otherwise, German state CPIs are going to be dropping in through the, through the morning, and then you've got some UK mortgage data happening at 9:30. Again, none of these anticipated to be market moving. Neither as well is the sentiment data at 10 o'clock coming out the eurozone. Very rare to see that impact European prices. So then we look ahead to the afternoon. No major 1:30s coming out of the States, but we do have today the US consumer confidence figure, which is expected to show further improvements up to 119 from 117.2 as the country continues to go through various phases of gradual reopening. And then you've got the API oil inventories coming out later on this evening, which will act as our reference point then for tomorrow's Department of Energy inventory release. Speaker-wise, Christine Lagarde, ECB president, speaks at Brussels Economic Forum late morning European time at 11 AM. And then Fed's Barkin, who is a voter this year, will be speaking at 2 PM this afternoon. And that is it. So not going to talk for longer than is necessary. Gonna let you guys really get on with the day. So my overall assessment is, from the news that's in play and in focus at the moment, I don't really have too much of a bias feeling bullish or bearish on the intraday outlook. In terms of oil, it's found a bit of a floor on the pullback down to consolidate around these push-up to multi-year highs. A little bit of factoring in perhaps of the expectations supply increase. FX markets pretty quiet overall. I think really the best is yet to come in terms of dollar movement and subsequent, and support or not for this hawkish tilt coming from the Fed and various speakers at the moment. And really that culminates on Friday, so could, barring anything unexpected, continue to trade relatively technically in range in terms of some of the major currency pairs. Gold is pretty quiet as well, so just keeping an eye on the likes of 1774, um, down to 71 as bottom end range trading, technically as support areas to just play out that fairly sideways pattern we've been seeing of late. All right, let you guys get on with the rest of the day. Um, any questions at all, feel free to reach me in the Discord room, Amplify Live. Otherwise, have a great day ahead. Thanks very much.