This Week In Markets: 29th Nov - 3rd Dec 2021 (Omicron Update)

Okay, hello, hope you are well. It's actually Sunday the 28th of November, so I thought I'd get my preview for the week ahead out before the market opens to get the week underway. And obviously a serious development on the COVID front with Omicron becoming now the, the latest cause for concern from the coronavirus pandemic. And, you know, first and foremost, before I give you an overview of the latest news and how how markets are going to potentially react as we go further forward into this week. First thing, I hope everyone is safe and sound, you and your loved ones, and remember to take care of yourself and each other and other people. Um, but yeah, swiftly, let's move on and talk about what's happening. And first things first, I'm going to jump straight to the charts and I'm going to have a look at where we finished last week because we had obviously a slightly unique situation where a majority of US participants were out of the market. Obviously, bond equity markets closed on Thursday, were open for shortened sessions on Friday, but that lack of volume probably definitely helped exacerbate some of the price movement. You probably read a lot of the headlines on Friday. The Dow was down in excess of 1,000 points. Looking at the Dow future here, it was down 1,100 in fact, and we closed pretty much at the low. So Just looking at the Dow on a daily continuation, and I wanted to just cycle through the 3 major US indices on the charts from a higher timeframe to give an idea of key technical levels to look for. And in the Dow, we actually broke beneath what was quite a key inflection point through the early and mid part of October, and we do trade below there at the moment. So on the downside, there is a bit of kind of clear air, if you like, to a deeper move, perhaps down to around the October low in the Dow, which which would be a considerable margin lower than where we are at the moment, some 700 points or so. But given the context, 700— another downward move would not be particularly too unsurprising given the fact that we pretty much doubled that move on the size of the sell-off on Friday just in one singular intraday session. Um, the important thing to note here is that while these losses sound quite sizable, don't forget that only takes back really the rally that we've seen over the course of the last 2 months or so. And so even if we were to drop back down even further throughout this week and down to, say, $33,000, having traded up at around $36,500, all in all, we'd still be pretty high up in this area of consolidation and what otherwise has been a pretty big continuation of the overall post-pandemic kind of rally that we've been seeing. Um, quickly cycling through the other charts and then I'll get into the news and what's been happening this weekend and what to look for next. Looking at the NASDAQ, gonna stick that on the daily continuation. Quite a key level we're at at the moment. You can see this is a multi-month picture. So going from where my mouse is here on the left is where we were beginning of the year, and you can see, yes, it's had its ebb and flow, uh, definitely respecting this trend channel on the downside for sure. Nice response to that back in early October. And you can see we were already trading all-time highs just around a week ago in the NASDAQ, but we pulled back down and we, we kind of resided at the 16,000 level on Friday, which was around that low you can see that we saw around the 10th, 11th of November before the push-up to all-time highs. So key level here, be looking out for any breakdown through 16,000. Wouldn't be surprised to see us fall back down to 15,706, which would put us back to the previous highs that we were printing back at late August, early Sep. And then you've got the 50 DMA coming in just below there, and around as well some areas of interesting previous resistance and support at around a similar level of 15, kind of 500 there, to keep an eye on as we go through the week. Further weighted downside moves, again, there are some interesting technical levels below, below there. I'd probably be looking at 15,169, and that would coincide with close proximity to that trend line, which, as I've said, you can see has been well respected going back over the course of the last year. So that's the NASDAQ. With the S&P, uh, and of course I tend to look at these major indices somewhat in sympathy with one another, so it's nice to look at the overall mapping of where we're trading at the moment. And I'd say the S&P, obviously reflecting that down day on Friday, but a little bit of space to the downside to this colored rectangle box here I've got from that previous September high an area of then resistance support through October. And that would be quite a key level, starts to bring in as well proximity to that 50 DMA. So as the week gets underway, I'll be keeping out 5548 as a support area there, um, to, to have a look at further deeper moves. Probably the bigger downside key area to hold for the week would be around this 4252-53 level, starts to encapsulate some of the SEP lows those previous all-time highs and support that we had through Q2 and Q3 of this year. All right, let's have a look at the, the news then and what's been going on. So let me get you up to speed. So 13 Omicron COVID-19 cases have been identified in the Netherlands as of Sunday. So that's got one of the largest outbreaks recorded at the moment. Along with additional cases that we've had confirmed. Germany too, the UK too, at least at the time that I'm recording this. Dutch authorities have said they found cases among 61 people who tested positive for COVID on two flights that arrived from South Africa on Friday. Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic have suspected or confirmed cases. Austria— excuse me, Australia, Hong Kong, and Israel have all identified cases too. So quite quickly, hence the rationale for locking down a lot of the air travel at the end of last week. And it seems to be the case though that— I think I was reading one in Italy— that given the incubation period for them to show symptoms, to probably then encourage some sort of testing to emerge, the likelihood is that this will be the, the new variant that is going to be spreading and certainly going to generate the most headline traffic. This as the week gets underway. Now, one thing that has come out and emerged is that symptoms linked to the Omicron coronavirus variant have been mild so far. But I think the important thing is to who is saying this and what— where it's coming from. And according to COVID-19 advisors for the South African government themselves— now, I'm a little bit disinclined, if you like, to really listen too much to what the South African government are going to say, because of course they're going to say something along those lines. Whether or not that might be the case, it could well be. But this is one of the things really that will be key for the beginning of trading for this week, is what do other governments say? What does the scientific community say? What do different scientific bodies start to say? And it's about, well, then we start to form around a general consensus view about how problematic this virus could become. And obviously that's going to take a bit of time. The UK is leaning on a strong vaccination program after— as its kind of best form of defense, and it will accelerate its booster shots, which have already been underway under new rules. You probably saw, so if you're in the UK, Boris Johnson spoke, um, and yesterday, and he said face masks will become mandatory in shops and other settings such as hairdressers public transport in England, all from 4 AM on Tuesday of this week. So just bear that in mind. Now, Britain, they are going to convene an urgent meeting of the G7. Um, that's going to happen with those health ministers on Monday to discuss this latest variant. So be on the lookout for any kind of more uniformed response coming out of the EU, and there's more broadly the G7 in itself. And the European Union, they've moved on Friday to shut down air traffic from South Africa Obviously, as I said, much of the rest of the world has followed, and cases so far have been in people who flew before restrictions obviously were made. The other things of note from the weekend's press was Moderna's chief medical officer, because there's a lot of talk at the moment obviously emerging about whether or not this new variant, because of the number of mutations, whether or not that it kind of reduces the effectiveness of the current vaccines that are in play. And if that were to be the case, how quickly could these pharmaceutical companies manufacture some kind of updated vaccine to counteract this specific mutation? And Moderna's medical officer Paul Burton said we should know more about the ability of the current vaccine to protect— protection in the next couple of weeks. So it's important to remember that, you know, a lot of what happened on Friday was a capitulation of really fear and uncertainty. Which creates a lot of heavy momentum-based selling pressure in otherwise a fairly illiquid market, lack of market real depth given the US were away for Thanksgiving, kind of exacerbating the price movement. The reality is, is that we're going to get more and more intel as that happens. And the more informed we are with information, the more kind of coordinated the general market movements are. It's this first part that generally has the most impact because of the degree of of uncertainties. He went on to say that if we have— have to make a brand new vaccine, I think that's going to be in early 2022 before that's really going to be available in large quantities. So yeah, it's going to be a kind of multi-week, multi-month process in order to get that up and running, but certainly much quicker perhaps than what we had at the beginning, given the fact that everything is already in place at this point in time. They've already been tracking these things and looking at previous mutations quite closely, so they're more better positioned to adapt for future changes. So going forward, really, in terms of what we're looking out for this week, I would say Omicron is definitely going to be in developments around it, the key to really ascertaining market sentiment in the short term. But as I'll describe, there are quite a few other calendar events to look out for. Particularly US-focused with payrolls on Friday. But the other thing then to kind of quickly cover was oil prices. And just flicking back over to the charts, oil prices obviously got hammered on Friday as fears about the demand implications then, particularly with grounding a lot of air travel and the potential that that could have. And as you can see here, oil, which we were trading Really last week up at around the $79 handle. We're now trading at the end of the session close on Friday, $68. So really large-scale move. And looking on a daily chart, I mean, here you can see the Friday move in context. And we found about an area of key support around a technical point of interest around $67.64. As you can see here from August-September price action, the market actually held up at that point. Any deeper downside moves, um, given the fact that probably more likely or not more restrictions will come into play, then if oil remains susceptible to downside movement, you've got the $65 marker here, and then $61.74 starts to bring in these low price points you can see from May and from the summer August of this year. On a weekly chart, perhaps it comes a little bit more clearer. So key areas here, you've got that the top of 20 2019, you can see, um, at this area with the top of the beginning of 2020 and that brief low point that we had in the summer of this year, that would come at $65.20. And then you've got that low that we've just seen in August, that would be further down at $61.74. So these would be key downside levels. Anything further beyond there, the $60 mark obviously, and then probably around this double bottom for what we had in April which would be $57.63. So yeah, key levels in oil to keep an eye on as we go through the week. And, you know, talking about oil, OPEC has already come out this weekend and they're moving their two technical meetings to later this week following that rout that we've had. And the main point there being that they want to evaluate this latest development with the new variant to see a little bit of dust settle before they can make a more coordinated and timely decision. Decision about the best thing with their supply agreement going on. So just from a timings perspective, the Joint Technical Committee is being moved to Wednesday instead of Monday. So it's been pushed back 2 days, and consequently the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, where they actually make the OPEC+ decision, that's now going to happen on Thursday instead of Tuesday. So everything's kind of been just bumped down the road 2 days, just so you're aware. OPEC, of course, they've also got to tackle as well this idea of What are they going to do in response to the planned release by the US and other consuming nations of barrels from their strategic oil reserves? And we had that, that news out of the US chiefly leading that last week. And this comes in the context of OPEC+ current plan being to return 400,000 barrels per day extra per month in an incremental fashion. But one would think there's a pretty high possibility now that given what's happened in price, given what's happened with this new variant and also what's happened with the SPR tap last week, that OPEC might well just decide, you know what, we're not going to do anything for this month, and they'll just roll over at the current rate, which will obviously be a little bit to the frustration of— to the US. But the US, just talking, you know, purely on price action, are getting a payoff here in the fact that the price is actually moving lower at the moment for their reason, but also more mainly now for the, the COVID reason, albeit there's obviously sharp implications of what this can mean going forward in terms of lockdowns in America if that were to happen. Um, looking at the week ahead, I'm just going to talk about the main things really, and going to start things off not so much on Monday because it's pretty quiet. It's actually Tuesday, then we get the eurozone GDP figures coming out. That's not GDP, CPI, I should say, for the month of November. The expectation here is that CPI in eurozone is going to have risen at the fastest pace in 3 decades. It's expected at 4.4%. Such a rise, though, would be very similar to what we've had in the US over recent weeks, so shouldn't really come as too much of a great surprise. And given the COVID situation, not just now with the latest variant, but with what the case situation was already looking at and the already restrictions that were being put in place prior to last week, hard to see it really, the ECB having much options at the moment in, in regards to inflation. And don't forget the inflation rate in the eurozone is much lower at this point in time comparatively to that in the US. And then just looking through the week, um, we've got US consumer confidence coming out as well on Tuesday, got Chinese Caixin PMI Manufacturing on Wednesday, you then get really a cluster of major US data. ADP on, on Wednesday, ISM Manufacturing. If you've got Non-Manufacturing due later on in the week as well on Friday, and then of course Non-Farm Payrolls. So Non-Farm Payrolls is expected to post another sizable incline of around 500K, if not more. Recent data now points to a sign of tightening in the labor market. We saw new applications for US unemployment benefits The US jobless claims last week falling to its lowest level since 1969, so we are looking for further improvements on that front. ISM Manufacturing Wednesday and the service sector reading on Friday also should confirm the strength in the economy whilst also highlighting the intensity of price pressures, and hence the reason why we've had this hawkish tilt and slight shift in direction that's causing the markets to reprice a little bit about the idea of potentially accelerating tapering come the new year and bringing in rate rises to perhaps the summer of 2022. The big kind of elephant in the room, of course, at the moment is how much does this, does this Omicron variant really take hold, and does that then cause then that entire inflation-focused kind of more timely normalization at the Fed to just slow down a little bit? We can't really answer that question yet, but I'm sure we'll be better informed as the week goes on. As I said, pending updates on the variant in itself, the main two points that I'd look at is how quickly case rates of the new variant start to pick up across the world, and then that will accordingly really dictate the type, the type of lockdowns that we might see, like in the UK Do we adopt working from home? Does it get more akin to what we had had in previous lockdowns? Really, we can only tell that by how quickly these case rates start to pick up. Then it's about the vaccine effectiveness against the new strain, but that I would say is not going to happen really this week. We might get some commentary about it, but scientific evidence to support it, it's probably going to take a number of weeks like the Moderna CEO has said. But that is it. And the final thing I just wanted to say is thank you, uh, those who listen to the Market Maker podcast that Piers and I do on a Friday where we wrap up the main week's events. And me and Zhao have done a micro career series on a Wednesday. Um, you guys have, have seen us now top 100 ratings on the Apple Podcast Store, which has pushed us back up into the into the higher top 20 in the charts. So I really appreciate that. I hope it's useful. If you haven't checked it out yet, just search for Market Maker Amplify Me on podcast, Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, things like that. You'll be able to find it. But with that, I wish you a good Sunday evening and have a good week ahead. Take care.