UK Lockdown Lifting Set To Be Delayed By A Fortnight

Okay, very good morning. It is Tuesday the 8th of June. Hope everyone is doing well. Gonna get you up to speed on the close on Wall Street where the major 3 indices finished mixed. The S&P was basically flat, the Dow down about a third, the Nasdaq minor outperformance, up around a quarter percent in a similar fashion to what we saw on the close on Friday with some of the tech names seeing some marginal outperformance. On the, the kind of heat map or the scoreboard, if you want to look at it that way, you can see it's fairly mixed. Some of the major-cap tech names obviously not being particularly fazed by that new historic trade— well, tax agreement that we heard announced at the weekend, because it was all pretty much well telegraphed and as to be expected. So here, Microsoft, Facebook, Tesla all generally higher. Amazon, Apple pretty flat overall. Um, one of the sweet spots was in the drug manufacturing kind of sector of healthcare, and in particular you can see here BIIB, or BIIB, which is Biogen stock. If you're following this yesterday, Biogen actually were up in excess of 60% yesterday and actually closed up around 38%. They surged after an Alzheimer's drug was approved by the FDA. lifting other biotech names as well. And you can see here, uh, the likes of LLY, Eli Lilly, up around 10% as well on the session. Um, the approval was the first clearance of an Alzheimer's therapy by the FDA in nearly 20 years, 2003, and it's one of the agency's most consequential decisions in years. Uh, the actual, uh, Aducanumab, which will be sold under the brand name Aduheim, is the first Alzheimer's drug to be approved that purports to slow down the progression of the disease. The medicine kind of technology breaking up clumps of amyloid plaques that form in the brain, which scientists believe cause the illness. So, you know, fantastic news for their Alzheimer's treatment and, and for those individual stocks. I think there's a couple of debate out though about the price of the treatment. I think I think it's particularly expensive, something like $56,000 for the treatment. But I guess that's just the, the course of, of how things normally play out in America. But nonetheless, from a market's point of view, pretty mixed in terms of the close on the stock performance on Wall Street. And, you know, one of the things to remember this week is that there are a couple of major risk events happening, whether that be midweek where we've got Chinese inflation metrics You've got the Bank of Canada. You've got the recommencement of the Iranian nuclear deal talks. You've got the US CPI number, which is arguably the most important thing this week. You've got the UK GDP. You've got the G7 kicking off at the end of the week. My point being is that there's a lot going on this week. And so, um, as per yesterday, which is very quiet, and as per when we look at the calendar for today, it equally is fairly uninspiring on the scheduled data releases. I think the, the main point is you've just got to be disciplined, patient, and, you know, understand that it's really mid and second half of the week where the action and subsequent price movement is really going to materialize. And so just adapting to those conditions and not being too, too bored, you know, in a way, and entering trades that might not necessarily be particularly seeing much large movement in the market. Um, but otherwise, in terms of some of these charts, if I was looking at WTI crude, we've had this trend channel on for some time as we've been on the pursuit of $70. And you'll remember, um, actually last week— if I just put an ellipse here— we momentarily saw— not last week, this is the recommencement of trade actually for this week— we touched $70. That was always our kind of long-term target I say long-term, medium-term target on this breakout that we saw in price action from that kind of multi-year high that we were trading around 6676. And we felt fairly comfortable in that call sitting on a direction that we would get eventually to that target. And since we've hit that, we've just kind of faded off. We've drifted a little bit south as well in overnight Asia-Pac trade. And in fact, this, this rectangle that I had marked up here, which was an area of previous upside respect of that channel, but also on support here, as you can see, and resistance. And we've just come up on the breakdown to come up to retest on that point. So technically just keeping an eye on that. But again, that, that kind of price pattern breaking down a little bit now as we consolidate and profit take short term from having achieved the target. So I definitely don't think that there's anything too too untoward here to think that oil prices are going to just collapse all of a sudden. I think it's just a natural order of things given that we've, we've gone up to $70. Otherwise, in the equity indices, again, things pretty quiet overall. You can see here, as far as the S&P 500 is concerned, this is generally what I'm keeping an eye on. Just a very slight steep, slight trend line going on here from where we were trading back at the beginning of last week, had a couple of tests on that, and that's holding for the moment. And that does coincide close proximity on the daily pivots to the R1 today. So between there and pivot, um, actually just providing a bit of a range during the Asia-Pacific session. Otherwise, just looking at the more broader range that we have been trading over the past couple of sessions as to generally what I'm looking at here. So nothing too exciting there either for the moment other than range kind of trading. As far as gold is concerned, we've had a little squeeze up during the APAC session. And you can see here that, that again, a trend line that we had marked up and we've been watching for some time in gold, going back to the price activity from the middle of May, which had been quite well respected in recent sessions. We actually broke above there a little bit in the APAC session. Hit then a corresponding trend line from the first and test on the third to what we printed overnight. And we've just drifted a little, a little further south as we trade basically flat at the moment in gold at $1,897. If we do break down that initial test on the late APAC low, then I'll be looking down at pivot just below and then $1,894.50. Which are those kind of lows on the 1st and the relative highs that we saw going back to Friday session. In terms of gold, again, obviously looking at the technical levels but also dollar fluctuation, the dollar is a touch firmer this morning, up about 0.15%. So with that, the major pairs just trading a touch heavy. It says a cable Again, kind of more range. Looking at it on a slightly more broader context, you can see here just going from left to right, it's been in a period of, of consolidation. And again, that makes sense because if you look at cable on a daily chart, we've kind of been pushing up for some time. And again, like with some of the other products, we're at a meaningful point. I mean, this is looking at a multi-year high going back to 2018. And so some consolidation up at these levels. There's, there's some rationale for the idea of cable staying up at this level given the general perception of kind of dollar weakness. But obviously looking at the US CPI this week to be a potential trigger in either direction for the greenback. But with— I'll talk about in a moment— potential for delay in the reopening in the UK, whether that happens or not, I don't think will have too much of a material impact economically to really detract from the pound being ultimately supported by the fact that that lockdown loosening will happen inevitably, whether 2 weeks or 4 weeks beyond that 21st of June deadline. So with that and further vaccinations happening and more supply, as we saw last week, of vaccines coming online, and with the positive GDP likely to come out on Friday, I don't really see too much other than if we did pull back, I'd probably be looking on the daily a more broader consolidation range of 140 up to 142.50, which is basically this zone of price action here. So if we did trade heavy, I, I don't, I don't think there's too much to, to look at that for any sea change fundamentally. As a weekly trade, probably the trigger of that would be if we got incredibly high US inflation and the dollar really strengthened, it could put us, put us down to the lower bound of that range. But for the moment, um, what I'm looking at here is, although it hasn't had 3 touches as yet, just keeping an eye on this, this kind of trend line going back to Friday's price activity and the retest that we saw this time yesterday. Any further breakdown of that, then I'd probably be keeping an eye down at 1.4111, which was this previous low. You can see it's been respected a couple of times and then beyond that point, the kind of ultimate range low at 140.81. Looking at it intraday, let's talk about the UK though, because there are a couple of articles to be aware of, one on the lockdown, the other on Brexit. And this is the first one. So this is looking at the Times newspaper. Did see a journalist from the paper tweeting this last night ahead of the formal printed publication going out today. And basically what it's talking about, um, the story here on the left-hand side on the front page is the lockdown lifting is set to be delayed by a fortnight as vaccines race to keep up with the Delta strain. The Delta strain being the Indian variant. And the delay would allow all over-50s to be fully vaccinated and leave enough time for those jabs really to become more effective. Because if you remember, this kind of builds up over time, the, the efficacy rate and therefore be more robust in terms of that older demographic before the actual restrictions are lifted. A cabinet source did state that they expect the delay to be between 2 weeks to a month. But if you caught that video from that conversation that Mike and I had last week, this doesn't come as too much of a surprise, and kind of the hints have already been given by various government officials. And Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, saying economically, which would be an impact if we if we did not reopen, that he'd be happy for a 2-week extension, which looks the most likely rather than the month at this point. In terms of timing, Boris Johnson is expected to make a formal announcement on Monday when government social distancing review is to be published. So it's probably Monday we'll get more details on that. But in terms of it weighing on the pound, I honestly don't think it's, it's a real reason of sorts for why the pound's just kind of drifting did a little bit in the overnight session. I just think it's part of the ebb and flow of the dollar movement. I wouldn't over-associate then the lockdown delay being a direct impact for cable today because this has already been a talking point for some time. And as I said, me and Mike aren't exactly, you know, rocket scientists. I think it was pretty obvious that a delay was looking somewhat more likely going forward. On the Brexit side of things, that, you know, Brexit is still a thing, by the way, still going on. It's starting to heat up a little bit, you know, and such is these types of news stories. It's, you know, I think I've expressed this before in a conversation I had with a group last week, you know, when it comes to political commentary, so say Biden or Putin or whoever it might be, or Brexit in this case, The commentary in terms of friction or when certain news topics might come up, it's normally not by surprise. It's normally because there's some degree of positioning for a negotiation, right? And Boris Johnson had a phone call with French President Macron yesterday. The EU and Britain are going to be meeting on Wednesday to recommence some talks around Brexit. And then of course you've got the G7 happening in Cornwall, England on Friday. So the fact that this has come back up to the, to the surface again is not that surprising timing-wise. But the point here is the EU is ready to consider tougher retaliatory measures if the UK government fails to implement its Brexit obligations over, you guessed it, Northern Ireland, according to an EU official. So under the Brexit trade deal agreed in December, both sides have have the right to impose retaliatory tariffs in extreme circumstances. And separately, the EU could prevent the UK financial services industry with getting access to the single market. So obviously the latter, you know, would be particularly harmful in that respect. But the point being is, as I said, they're going into a new round of kind of formal discussions tomorrow. So the fact that this is emerging at the beginning of the week, going into those meetings, you know, it's all fairly tactical in terms of negotiation on that side. But it does go some way to show that, you know, Brexit is kind of— well, has been definitely overshadowed by COVID. But there's still a lot of remaining elements, particularly the one that was the issue right at the beginning still remains one of the main issues, which is that of trade and Northern Ireland border. But as far as the pound is concerned, I wouldn't again say it's particularly particularly something that's weighed on the pound. You could argue there's a minor underperformance of sterling against the euro, but both pairs are lower, which is predominantly a reflection of the slight strength seen in the dollar this morning, more than I'd say of these types of headlines. As far as the calendar is concerned for today, it's— it is a very quiet day. So I do think that, you know, be aware of that and adjust to the conditions. Um, so it could be a day for being more pragmatic and conservative in that respect in terms of any trade ideas. Um, in terms of things to look out for, um, going up, we've just gone through 7 o'clock. In fact, we've just had the German industrial output came in at -1% versus expected 0.05%. So not really that surprising in terms of away from its consensus estimate. No real reaction seen in the euro currency. The main thing of data for this morning is the German ZEW economic sentiment for June, expected to improve to 86 from 84.4. Again, that's not particularly surprising given the fact that just going forward, analysts, as per corporate companies on the ground, generally getting a little bit more optimistic that the end is in sight in terms of case rates now on decline and further reopening that's likely to happen over the coming months. So improvement in that figure, I don't think necessarily will be a real injection of price for European assets, but nonetheless, that at 10 o'clock will be worth keeping an eye out for. As far as the afternoon is concerned, there really isn't anything major coming out, and then therefore that leads us into the API crude oil inventories coming out in the evening, 9:30 London time. Speaker-wise, you've got Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane. But twofold, he is outgoing, and so therefore what he says generally has been watered down in terms of the market putting too much credence, given his, his view will no longer be part of that group in the foreseeable future. And then secondly, the subject of his speech is inequality workshop at the University of Glasgow. So I'm not expecting too much in the way of commentary on economy, if any, on, on monetary policy. German Finance Minister Scholz does speak on the budget policy during the pandemic, could be of some interest. That's at 3 PM London time. Otherwise, in fixed income, UK German supply and $58 billion in the 3-year note auction coming out of the US. And that is it. So So as I said, um, you know, a day for just taking it for what it is, um, not being too distracted and just saving some ammunition perhaps, unless a particularly strong opportunity emerges. It's probably going to be more based from technicals than fundamentals at this point in time. Um, saving the best for tomorrow and the rest of the week, it would be my kind of view. All right guys, I'll leave it at that. Wish you a good day and I'll see you in the Amplify live chat room. Take care.