US Stocks Rally & Bitcoin Up The Most In More Than A Month

K, very good morning to you. It is Wednesday, 22nd of December, and it is the final briefing of the year. So I think first things first, I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who, who listens, who's liked a video, who's left a comment. I super appreciate all the engagement and you guys following every day. So if you're new here, Welcome. If you've been a long-time member of the community, then once again, thank you very much. And since we've launched Amplify Me back in September, we've made some incredible headway on the new mission, which I'm sure you're all aware of now with some of the rebranding that we've done online. And we've managed to start the Market Maker podcast and newsletter. We've now got a community there into nearly 40,000 people. And that's only over the last 3 months. We've managed to help over 15,000 students take the Finance Accelerator simulation from all over the world. And we've managed to fast-track some of those candidates as well with some of our institutional clients. So it's been an amazing couple of months. Uh, I'm sure there's going to be much more in store for 2022. We've got some exciting announcements already we've been working on, which, uh, as I said, I'm quite excited to bring to you guys at the beginning of the year. But first and foremost, Um, take care over the holiday period. Obviously it's been a challenging year once again with the pandemic, so I hope everyone's been safe and well and hope you have a nice time with your loved ones and nearest and dearest over the coming week or so. But I'll be back, uh, first week of January as per normal. I'll still be tweeting over the holiday break, so while there won't be any YouTube videos per se, I will try my best. I am going to be actually abroad for part of it. But if I can and something really big does happen, I will endeavor to jump on. But I'll be tweeting nonetheless wherever I am. So feel free to follow me on Twitter. But let's get on with it and let's talk about— let's talk about Bitcoin first. And yeah, I've got the charts up. Well, I've got the headline here: Bitcoin snaps slide with biggest one-day gain since November. And actually, you can see it here. So this is looking at the 30-minute candlestick on the Bitcoin future. And you can see here quite a big uptick that we had in yesterday's overnight APAC session. And we kind of held those gains. They've just bumped a little higher to retest up towards the highs that we saw on the 15th of this month, just shy of the $50,000 level. So $49,500 at the moment. Why exactly is this happening? Well, not a great deal really of, of catalysts. I mean, one of the things is if you look at the downward move that we had seen, this is looking more now on a daily chart for Bitcoin. We actually peaked up around the 10th of November, so it's only around 6 weeks ago or so. We've had a pretty substantial decline in Bitcoin, as we have done in the whole crypto space, as we came off those kind of record pushes that we saw in October. And we've declined around 34.5% to that low. So finding a bit of a floor. And as you can see here from a kind of technical perspective, this trend line going back to the low we printed at the beginning of August to then support through the latter point of September kind of playing out so far as we move back to the $50K margin. One of the things, though, I just wanted to flash up was kind of the year in review really for Bitcoin, because it's been a— it's been a very much a big year for the crypto space. Seeing more broader adoption, both in the kind of, I guess, conscious of the public with people like Mark Zuckerberg bringing metaverse and Web3 and the potential that that brings for the decentralized space and cryptocurrencies, but also adoption in an institutional sense. We've seen obviously the ETFs come out from ProShares and Valkyrie and so on. That definitely contributed to a lot of the push-up in price to the then resulting record high that we saw in Q4 of this year. We saw that really big push up from around $40K up to close to $70K through that September-October period. But, you know, going back to the beginning of the year, if you can believe it, Coinbase, it seems like it's been around forever, but that listing was only actually towards the back end of Q1 of this year. We then had Musk's comments on Bitcoin greenness and the concerns that he was suggesting. So this came irrespective of the fact that he talked about the adoption of using that for payment terms. Then you had lots of the PBOC, Chinese government lockdown, trying to make sure that things like mining and other just general things that the Chinese have been doing, their government, to restrict other types of measures across broader sectors really weighed on the crypto space. We actually kind of saw a floor of around $30K in the summer, and as I said, got up to around the $70K mark, and now we're residing at around $50K. Question to you guys though, and I'd want to see your answers in a comment below on this video, and that is: where do you think Bitcoin is going to trade this time 2022? 12 months from now, what's your call on Bitcoin? So I'll drop my call on the video as well. I'll try not to be too anchored to the guesses that you guys put down. So I'll endeavor to put my, my forecast first. But yeah, hit me up. Let me know what it is that you think where Bitcoin is going to be this time next year. All right. Well, look, back to the broader charts on the kind of global macro perspective. You can see here we had a pretty decent rally on Wall Street yesterday, really a little dip at the open and then a drive thereafter. And post the European exit, markets just continue to move to the upside. So actually we had a pretty solid finish on Wall Street. The technology-heavy Nasdaq outperformed. It was actually up about 2.4%, gains around 1.8% in the S&P, 1.6% in the Dow. Some of the bigger movers, Micron Tech, they were up around nearly 11% on an upbeat forecast. Nike, I'm sure you read quite a bit about, they were up over 6%, rallied as revenue in North America increased, offsetting a bit of a drop that they've seen in China. Other notable news elements that you might be aware of were some of these, which were President Joe Biden said he still has a chance to strike a deal with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin to get his near $2 trillion economic plan through Congress. Again, the delayment of that was, was one of the contributing factors that led to some of the weakness a few sessions ago and the dust kind of settling a little bit on nervousness around the Omicron situation. We also saw yesterday Pfizer and Merck closed off their session lows as Bloomberg reported that US FDA is set to authorize the pills to treat coronavirus as soon as, as this week as well. On the COVID side, AstraZeneca said yesterday they're also working with Oxford University to produce a vaccine for the Omicron coronavirus variant, so just becoming the latest vaccine maker to join the rest looking to develop variant-specific viruses going or vaccines going forward. Otherwise, the other major news that you might have seen yesterday, it's been a lot of speculation about what might happen to the UK in regards to lockdown, and the Prime Minister came out yesterday and basically said that no new restrictions will be brought into England before Christmas. But Boris Johnson did say that ministers cannot rule out further measures after the 25th of December with Omicron spreading at a speed never seen before, and adding that government will continue to closely monitor the data. I would not hesitate to act after Christmas if needed. My, my view on this, from the situation of strategy from government, is that I do think that even though numbers seemingly from a case perspective are starting to plateau a little bit around that kind of 90k mark on a daily basis, I do think that he doesn't really have a— the political power to enact any type of measures before Christmas. He doesn't have the time to do that as well, given the procedural way that this needs to be voted for through Parliament. And the result of him doing that now, given the pushback that he's had with already the, the likes of the passport, vaccine passport rules and so forth, it would be politically almost suicide for him at this point in time. So Do I think he's going to enact more stricter and go to that kind of step 2 approach from the previous format of restrictions that we had, which increases things like mixing and social distancing and things like that? Yes, I think that will come on the 27th. So people will have their Christmas, but then thereafter, because generally that mixing then is probably going to see then the aftermath, a bit of a pick up again of, of renewed cases like we've seen in the past. And so probably those measures will be adopted, but it will allow people to have Christmas is a reasonable estimate, I would say. In terms of the impact that would have on sterling, I don't actually think it's probably a great deal, to be honest, because a lot of this I think is to be expected. So really it's about tracking the coronavirus and ensuring then that it doesn't get more materially worse than what we're already kind of forecasting at the moment. And as you would have read, a lot of the scientific advisers whether from Imperial College, whether from Sage, so forth, they're all pretty bearish at the moment anyway. So we're already pretty positioned for a fairly negative outcome. And at this point, the kind of incremental step downs in— or step ups, I should say— in restrictions that would come if it were necessary, I think allows the market to kind of acclimatize in a fairly graduated fashion. So I don't think actually a move to step 2 would come as a great deal of shock, and I wouldn't really look for for a massive move in sterling on the back of that, in that between Christmas and New Year period, if that was to materialize. It really depends if they were to see very aggressive measures, which I don't think Johnson can do anyway politically, then it might be to the contrary and it might be more aggressive move to the downside for sterling. All right, a few other things. It is generally quite quiet. I'd say markets overall on a cross-asset class basis are fairly reflective of the time of year. Given the calendar is pretty quiet today and for this week, really, I mean, we've got core PCE tomorrow from the US. This is probably the only final highlight. But again, volumes decreasing. Markets have seen some decent action last couple of days. But as far as this morning's open is concerned, it's pretty slow going. The other story just to bring to you is about Russia. And the reason for that is on the geopolitical front, Putin has said that Russia has no room to retreat in a standoff with the US over the Ukraine Ukraine situation and would be forced into tough response unless the West dropped its aggressive line. And of course, Russia rejecting Ukrainian, US accusations it's preparing for an invasion of Ukraine, um, as early as next month in the new year. Now what's quite interesting here on the back of this, the kind of hook is that European gas prices are seeing some volatility again. You remember a few months ago, this is when we saw that really sharp acceleration in prices when we had that whole fuel crisis, particularly evident here in the UK that you saw. And one of the things here is that European gas prices are surging back to record high levels as flows from a key Russian pipeline stopped. And that spooked buyers— this was yesterday— that have been scrambling to secure supplies during a deepening energy crunch that we've been seeing ongoing for a couple of months. The latest price rally comes after flows from the Yamal Europe pipeline, one of the three routes Russia's state-owned Gazprom uses to supply natural gas to northwestern Europe. It stopped as temperatures plunged in Moscow and Gazprom decided not to book export capacity. Um, context: more than a third of EU's gas supplies come from Russia, but the year inflows have fallen. And of course, this has led to many politicians in Europe and industry experts accusing Russia of withholding supply to press EU leaders to approve the controversial fourth pipeline, that being the Nord Stream 2. So there's a lot of layers, um, to this energy onion, uh, and yeah, just interested to see how, how this goes because this then does trickle down the effect to the consumer and us and our energy bills as well, at a point where we're at at the moment, which is already pretty, pretty tight on the kind of the average consumer given the inflationary conditions we've been seeing throughout this year. All right, in terms of the actual calendar, it's pretty slow going. As I said, you've had UK GDP numbers, but these are kind of Q3 prints, so they're very, very dated, a bit stale now. The quarter-on-quarter print came in at 1.1% against expected 1.3%. Year-on-year 6.8 against the expected 6.6. No real much movement in sterling, to be quite honest, although cable is touching up and around its APAC highs at the moment. Um, otherwise, as far as the session is concerned, we get the final Q3 reading as well from the US, expected to print at 2.1. Again, it's pretty same case as what I described there for the UK. But then you get US consumer confidence, existing home sales coming out at 3 and you've got your DOE Energy Oil Inventories at 3:30. But that is it. So once again, thank you for watching. If you have done for the first time or throughout the year, super appreciate it. And yeah, take care, stay safe, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thanks, guys.