This Week In Markets: 4th - 7th January 2022 (+ Update on Tesla & Apple)

Okay, good morning, good morning, and welcome back to 2022. Hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and New Year. And gonna get you up to speed on what happened if you weren't in the market trading yesterday. Markets were open stateside and we did see another record close for the Dow, and some updates for some of the bigger cap tech stocks we can see here like by Apple hitting $3 trillion intraday for the first time ever, and Tesla shares were up around 14%. Yep, you heard me right, 14%. So we'll look at why. Um, quick look at the charts then otherwise for where we reside at the moment on the multi-asset class kind of picture. And currency markets pretty flat overall, minor losses around 6 pips each in euro-dollar and cable, top left. Uh, gold just retracing a hefty multi-week largest decline that we saw yesterday as US yield Yields popped up. You can see here gold top right coming under some selling pressure, and this is looking at gold futures through $1,821 yesterday and dipping to around the $1,800 level before finding a bit of support. Mild recovery seen this morning as Europe steps back into the market, up around $5. Came as US yields were higher yesterday. The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield rose by nearly 0.13 percentage points, exceeding 1.6% for the first time since the emergence in late November of the Omicron strain of the coronavirus. And that sent yields tumbling. It marked one of the biggest Treasury sell-offs over the past year, in fact, that we had yesterday. And hence as well the reason why gold was under a bit of pressure. Otherwise, elsewhere, oil pretty quiet, largely flat, sitting at $76 ahead of the OPEC meeting later. I'll get up to speed speed on that at the moment. The technical meetings that took place on Monday and equity index futures broadly seen higher following the positive handover from the US that was seen overnight. But before I begin and go into more detail on the heat map here, don't forget if you're new to the channel to hit the subscribe button. I was looking at some of the statistics for our channel over the Christmas period, and I do know that there's a large portion of you that watch and aren't subscribed. So massively appreciate it. Hit the subscribe button. You'll get the alerts, macro updates from me every single day, and then ad hoc pieces will go out anytime there's any emerging and breaking news that, that is apparent. All right, so looking at the heat map, and first things first, let's talk about Tesla. You can see here up 14%. So hotspots yesterday that kind of dragged the indices higher— we did finish up around 0.6% in the S&P and the Dow. The NASDAQ, big outperformer, chiefly led by Tesla of course, was up 1.2% as an index. Um, so Amazon up 2%, Apple up 2.5%. With that yield move I just described, financials were up nicely— banks, credit services, energy as well was up substantially as well yesterday. But looking at Tesla, what was the deal? Why did they move so sharply higher? Um, the carmaker navigated supply chain disruptions to report blowout deliveries essentially in the fourth quarter, um, 308 600 vehicles worldwide. Analysts were only anticipating around 263,000. The better-than-expected results posted on Sunday at the weekend pushed Tesla's total sales for the year to more than 936,000. That's up about 87% over the 2020 delivery figures of just under half a million vehicles. And actually, you know, when you look at Tesla's share price— just going to quickly pop it up here on the chart, flip over— you can see what a phenomenal increase that is. from where we were prior to Christmas. We were lagging around $900. Of course, Elon Musk getting pretty much done now with that 10% disposal of his stake, exercising those options and paying the subsequent tax and so forth. And that has been a large rationale for some of the weakness in the stock price going through the period of the last several weeks. And all of that has basically been taken back with the move that we've seen from around the 20th when we hit the initial low that was seen um, down in the Tesla stock price at $886. We're now trading back at $1,200, which of course from a technical perspective does hold some significance. That was that peak in price action we had back on the 22nd, and here we are back at that psychological level again. So not that far off, of course, from the all-time high that we were seeing only back in early November, which was just short of the $1,250 mark. So just incredible, the moves that you see in a company of that magnitude market cap of these days. And talking of market cap, Apple briefly topped $3 trillion for the first company to do so ever. Um, did close slightly below there, but intraday did hit that milestone. Nothing particularly new for Apple, um, continues to soldier on as it has done, as we saw towards the close of last year. Uh, here's quite a cool graphic that goes back and looks at the last 20-year history of Apple, some of the meaningful kind of fundamentals and product service developments and news that's happened over that period. And here you're looking at the iPod. I don't know if anyone remembers having an iPod. I remember having one at university. I think you're pretty cool back then if you were rocking the, uh, the wheel iPod back then. But the iPod back in 2002, the iPhone of course that came A few years later, I think it was '07 when that came out, that's death of Steve Jobs, the Apple Watch. And then of course, what a lot of people are looking at as well at the moment is the movement into AR and VR technology, of which I think it was analysts like Morgan Stanley with their quite bullish price target that they issued towards the end of last year. They're still yet to be baked into the company's share prices, even though they're looking slightly overvalued by more traditional metrics for company at this point in time. Um, all right, so that was the overall kind of what was happening yesterday. So overall, a really positive start to beginning of the year. I won't get too excited just yet, it's just one day's worth of price action. But for the time being, we kind of ended as we began, as we ended. The Santa Claus rally delivered as he always does through that period, and then we had a positive day yesterday. Otherwise, let's just take a look at some other headlines, just quickly wrapping up where we're at at the moment on the Omicron coronavirus situation. So starting with the UK, Boris Johnson admitted the NHS is coming under major pressure because of the variant, but said that England would stick with existing COVID-19 restrictions for now. And this is although we're starting to see pressure on the hospital network, we're also seeing slight upticks in death rates and so forth. The idea being that this is a much more mild case and variant compared to previous strains, um, concluding the rationale of the government at the moment. They are, I think, due to give an update on restrictions on Wednesday, but as per this commentary here, not expecting any much movement at this point in time, but subject to change of course. The government by numbers on Monday reported 157,758 coronavirus cases in England and Scotland last 24-hour period, meaning that 1.2 million people across the UK have tested positive for COVID-19 over the last 7 days, up 50% compared with the previous week. Do note though that some scientists have warned that trends over the Christmas period are less reliable than usual because of an incomplete reporting during the festive season. And also as well, a lot of the news you probably read about difficulties in the distribution of testing kits in order to pick up. The amount of cases there are at the moment as well could well be playing a hand into that. So we'll be keeping an eye out for numbers as they come out over the coming days. Otherwise, jumping over stateside, the situation there, this is what it looks like. And you can see this, this really sharp surge well and above any case rates that we saw this time of last year, which was just over 200K. We're now well over 400,000 in terms of the 7-day rolling average of new COVID cases in the US, um, and that is double its rate from a week earlier, and as you can see, far higher than previous peaks. At the moment, hospitalizations have ticked up, deaths stable, but that being a normal sequence of events that we tend to see with these sorts of things. So we continue to keep an eye on the states. Germany is contemplating further measures to protect critical services at the moment as well, whereas on the vaccine side and medical treatments. US regulators gave emergency approval yesterday for people aged between 12 and 15 for a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine. All right, elsewhere, OPEC. We do have an OPEC meeting happening later today. I think it's going to be kicking off around midday and 1 PM for the subsequent kind of the way that those meetings get rolled out. 3 OPEC sources have told Reuters the group is likely to stick to its plan to increase output by 400,000 barrels per day in February as it has done each month since August. So not expecting much in surprises there. At a preliminary meeting on Monday, the group's analysts cut their estimates for the surplus expected in the first quarter, predicting weaker supply growth from its rivals. The other thing as well that a few people are looking at in the oil market is Libya. They expect oil production to drop by another 200,000 barrels a day over the next week as workers try to fix a damaged pipeline. The latest outage comes less than 2 weeks after militias shut down OPEC's members' biggest field, the Sharara, causing output, excuse me, to fall around 350,000 barrels per day. When you put all of these issues together, the estimations are that closures will reduce Libyan production by around 700,000 barrels per day. The country in itself was producing around 1.2 million brows per day last year on average, as context. Last month, Libya delayed a presidential election meant to end political divisions and help stabilize the energy sector. That hasn't happened. Lots of civil unrest, as always is the case in Libya, now with damaged pipelines causing this latest kind of more tightness on the oversupply situation that OPEC were foreseeing in the beginning of the year. And actually, When you look at the daily chart of WTI crude oil, we'll just have a look at that at the moment. You can see here this rectangle was going back to really late November when we had the initial signs of the outbreak or first identification of the COVID variant, the new one, Omicron, of course, in South Africa. If you look to where we were trading in oil, which was around $77.50, we're currently trading around $76 at the moment and having traded up to around pretty much $77.50 already. In the last few trading days of 2021. So pretty much all of that weakness that was seen on the initial knee-jerk reaction to this new highly transmissible variant has been recovered in crude oil when you're looking at it on a daily continuation basis. Um, all right, and then overnight in China, a few things to update on, being that their key manufacturing PMI came in a touch higher than expected. Came in at 50.9 against expectations of 50 and back into expansionary territory from the 49.9 that we saw last month. In other news for China, worth noting, we've got China Lunar New Year holiday, of course, coming in a couple of weeks' time. Bloomberg were reporting that the country is facing a $708 million cash demand this month, which is around 18% up year on year, according to Bloomberg. Calculations, and that's amid maturing debt and seasonal demand for cash ahead of the Lunar New Year period on the 1st of Feb. So it's quite normal, given the complete shutdown of China over that period for a week or so for New Year, that we see, uh, quite a lot of attention around the liquidity situation and how supportive then the central bank is in between now and the coming weeks. And it's not that irregular to see then potential for things like cuts to the RRR and large-size liquidity injections. So if those things don't happen, that might raise some concerns as the week and weeks go on about tightness of cash and liquidity in that region, which net-net translates into more negative developments going forward. So something to just be aware of. And then another thing to be aware of is Turkish, Turkish lira, of course, where Turkey's annual inflation rate came out yesterday. It surged to 36.1% last month. That's the highest in 19 years. Analysts were looking for a print of only just over 30%. So much higher than expected. And of course, comes after the lira shed some 44% of value last year as the central bank slashed interest rates to deliver Erdoğan's somewhat unorthodox approach to monetary policy, of course. To put this into a bit of perspective, Some economists predict inflation could reach as high as 50% by spring unless the direction of monetary policy is reversed, which I'd say is highly unlikely at this point in time. Goldman Sachs, the US bank, said it would remain— that's Turkish inflation— above 40% for most of the year ahead as well, going further forward. Then the other thing that's just to be aware of, the White House is likely to nominate economist Philip Jefferson for a seat on the Fed Board of Governors. According to people familiar with the matter. So one of the things that we tend to ask ourselves when there becomes nominations for new appointees on a decision-making board on a central bank, as we try to determine how hawkish or dovish and so on that they are and whether or not that tilts then the composition of the decision-making at a central bank, is their background. So with Jefferson, the background is, is a doctorate in economics from the University of Virginia. Vice president of academic affairs, dean of faculty, and economics professor at Davidson College in North Carolina. Worked at the Federal Reserve twice before, has served as economist on the board's monetary affairs division from '96 to '97, and was a research assistant in the financial analysis section of the bank from '83 to 1985 as well. Now, President Joe Biden has 3 more seats to fill on the board, so something to just continue to keep an eye on. Including a new vice chair for supervision. Uh, Sarah Bloom Raskin has emerged as a leading candidate for that latter position at this point in time. Okay, quick look at the week ahead. Um, I know this is quite small to look at, so just going over some of the highlights. Later on today, we do indeed get the latest data coming out of the US for manufacturing. I'm just double-checking I've got all my, the right things aligned here. So US manufacturing PMI, services PMI, ADP figures all coming out this week. And of course, we'll be keeping a close eye on that jobs component because we get the release of US nonfarm payrolls on Friday. So I'll do my best to try and cover that live if I can on the YouTube channel. So again, another reason to subscribe so you get a notification when we go live. Otherwise, other than that, Eurozone flash HICP is out on Friday morning. You've also got University of Michigan sentiment out later that day. A couple of Fed speakers, Bullard speaking on Thursday on US economy and monetary policy, Mary Daly speaking on Friday as well. And you've got Chinese trade data to have a look out for, I think, as we go into the, the Thursday overnight into the Friday morning open as well, which will be particularly interesting to see how that is performing given their zero tolerance approach that we've seen to the coronavirus situation. All right, I'm gonna leave it there. As per usual, you can jump on my Twitter account to see the full notes of this, this briefing if you need it. And yeah, welcome back, and I look forward to the next briefing tomorrow morning. All right, take care.