What To Watch As Vaccine Enthusiasm Fades

Okay, very good morning. My name is Anthony Cheung. I'm the head of market analysis here at Amplify Trading. It is Wednesday the 20th of May, so I'm going to run you through some of the key stories from last night and what we're looking out for on the day ahead. And remember to check out AmplifyTrading.com, just on the trader page of our website. For those who are not familiar, we have a variety of different training programs that we offer, from an e-learning online on-demand portal all the way through to more intensive and now fully online training that we deliver from here in London. So check that out, I'll put the link into the video. And don't forget to like and subscribe to the YouTube channel for more content from my colleagues and myself. But getting straight into the, the briefing, let's have a look at the charts this morning and Yeah, a little bit touch of, uh, risk-off from what happened last night, which was an update on that vaccine news that obviously did move the markets on Monday's session. I'll go into that in a bit more detail shortly, but you can see here in the center-right chart the S&P 500 just breaking down into the final half an hour or so of trade on Wall Street, breaking through the kind of late European morning low, and that did see us finish down, and it kind of did fill filter into the Asia-Pacific session. The DAX playing a little bit of catch-up is down about 67 points, so slightly underperforming that of where the US indices trade at the moment, which is marginally positive, having steadied a little bit and recovered from that initial knee-jerk move. As a consequence though of that, gold up about $6.50 and the US 10-year is up about 4.5 ticks. In the currency markets, pretty quiet really. The Dollar Index is just stabilizing after having moved considerably lower, back below 100 over the last day or so. And so major currency pairs, uh, fairly quiet. Cable, little dip, just breaking some of the quiet trade that was seen overnight, the Asia-Pacific session, to just break down here as Europe has come into the market and run down to the pivot level in the futures. And we have had UK CPI come out It's April data, so I don't really think it's particularly market moving because markets expect no different at this point. But the inflation data came in at year-on-year 0.8% versus expected 0.9%. The month-to-month -0.2% against expected -0.1%. The core readings were 0.1% and 1.4%. So yeah, definitely reality to the massive drop in demand, of course, just given the, the onerous lockdown that we've been under here in the UK? And does that reignite that kind of negative rate debate which has kind of been raging since the weekend from Haldane and Tenreyro, who have been speaking from the, the BoE Monetary Policy Committee? On that front, don't forget Bailey and some of his senior colleagues from the bank are testifying to the Treasury Select Committee later on today. I think it's this afternoon, and it's a similar kind of format. So if you're If you're watching this in America, you're not familiar with the Select Committee in the UK. It's basically similar process to what you had with the Senate Banking Committee with Powell yesterday. It's when the, the central bank head basically reports back to what policies are they doing and what's their plan going forward. But similar routine in the, the fact that markets look at it with fairly little threat that it's going to be market moving because largely it's not typically a staging platform for the bank to unveil new forward guidance or anything like that. But there's obviously a risk of course, just given the situation globally is quite, quite fluid, that something could be said. So, you know, just something to be aware of on the calendar for today. Otherwise, elsewhere, oil prices, yeah, no crazy fluctuations like we had seen as we've gone through the expiration of the contract yesterday. And so looking at the July one, we're flat at the moment, trading on $32 handle, right on the pivot. But I'm going to look at oil in a bit more detail shortly. So that's, that's the general sentiment at the European morning open. But let's have a look at a couple of different things. And this was the report that came out last night. Now these guys here, this website is called Stat News. They have been the one that broke the Gilead story a few weeks back. They're the one that broke this latest story as well that did move the market. So definitely worth kind of bookmarking that website. Find their Twitter account. You know, a good way to build out your Twitter kind of lists. And this should be something where you don't just keep adding people all the time. You've got to be adding people who are providing value on the specific topic that's really moving markets right there and then. And so in this case, you know, Helen Brandswell— never heard of this lady, but you know, this is the sort of thing where, okay, so she tweets. Who is she? She's the senior writer infectious diseases at Stat News. Just have a look, how frequently does she tweet? What does she tweet about? You know, is it, is it always on point in terms of her qualified subject matter here being the infectious diseases? And if so, how regularly does she tweet? Because you don't want to follow someone like Warren Buffett who never tweets, even though he's very important, because it adds zero value. And if it does, and she breaks this quite, quite frequently, not only about breaking news exclusive to what she's written, but also just, just insight, little snippets of, you know, 140, 240 characters where you can get an update just when you're looking on your Twitter feed. So in this case, let's say this will be someone I'll go back to and have a more thorough check, but I probably would follow, and then I'll look to update accordingly. And interestingly, you know, if you're developing your Twitter feed You know, if she is quite senior, she's obviously verified by Twitter. Well, who does she follow? Because her relative follower-to-following ratio is excellent. You know, she's got 175,000 followers and she only follows 1,800 people. The question then leads for me was, well, who are these 1,800 people? And I'm sure with at least just half an hour worth of investigation, I could dig out probably 5 to 10 quality COVID-19 watchers, where potentially I could get a little bit of noise on the ground before it becomes public knowledge. And that's how you use Twitter. So, you know, just while I was on the subject, I thought I'd just cover that quickly. The main thing here though, the vaccine experts said that Moderna didn't produce data critical to assessing COVID-19 vaccine. And the interesting takeaway point here, uh, and I think this is backstopped by the fact that the market had a very similar reaction to that Gilead news that you remember came out a few weeks ago when the market ramped on a headline, but then when you actually read the article, it was a little bit like, hang about, this really isn't quite as far along down the road yet to start jumping to conclusions that we've got this vaccine. And, you know, really good kind of one line that I read in this article was that, you know, when it comes to the scientific practitioners, if you like, they don't read the statements that these companies put out, they read the supplementary kind of the appendix, the numbers. That's what matters. And actually, when you read the numbers, it's severely lacking when this first Moderna news came out. Now don't get me wrong, we're here to observe financial markets, and financial markets do see this knee-jerk reaction. It's obviously one of the most critical things which the market is looking for and would have, if found, repercussions about the shape and speed of the economic recovery. So Markets are super sensitive to this news, but my only word of advice here is that, you know, really twofold. I think one, the market will start to get a little bit fatigued, and I think the, uh, let's say that the velocity of the rallies and falls on the back of this type of vaccine news might start to dissipate over time because markets will come acclimatized to the fact that, look, it's probably unlikely we're going to get some kind of breakthrough this early. And then secondly, you know, using a bit of a broad brush, but look, science just doesn't work that fast. You know, science is about data, it's about testing, and it's about looking at those results and making very small adjustments and retesting. And this is a very arduous and long process. That's just the development of how drugs work. So the idea I think that people have you know, wherever that comes from, the assumption that, you know, you kind of— there's this guy tucked away in a room in a glass box writing like mathematical formulas on a, on a window. I think, you know, that's a little bit far-fetched. It doesn't really work like that in reality. And the reality is it's going to be a number of months, i.e. 9, 12, however long it may take until we have a definitive answer to the vaccine for COVID-19. And I think when you actually read a bit more about this Moderna drug, it really is quite, quite loose in terms of a lot of its assumptions and the size of the data which it was testing. So yeah, just a couple of words of advice on how I'll be monitoring that type of news going forward. But overall, you know, a little bit of a dip overnight and it's slightly impaired sentiment, but I don't think, you know, for me, the market, when it rallied on Monday wasn't just rallying on this news. I know this was the catalyst, but I think there's, you know, there's a few other things at play. And one of those, of course, is the coronavirus. And on that front, you know, and this is a relative positive for now, but obviously warrants extreme vigilance in, in monitoring the situation, but Europe's coronavirus spread in check as lockdowns are loosened. And this is one of the things obviously that we've been watching incredibly closely because any kind of signs of a second wave of a significant magnitude, given how depressed the economic situation already is and the vast amount of response that central banks and governments have already done, obviously a large second wave would be disastrous if not controlled in the right manner. And so people are watching this very closely, but overall, I'm just having a quick run over a few different graphics out of Bloomberg This is looking at Germany and it's looking at the Coronavirus Germany confirmed cases on the bar chart. We're going back to around the middle of April up to the current day. So the current status here is that, as you can see, some shopkeepers in Germany were allowed to start resuming business on the 20th of April, and when that happened you had a slight pickup in the following few days before then the the kind of continuation of the decrease in trend. That then got to the point where they could kind of take their next decision, which was schools were partially reactivated from May 4th. Social distancing rules across the board still remain in place. Small pickup, and then we've started to gradually move lower again. So, you know, as they've gone through this kind of, uh, coordinated, kind of well-planned reopening in a very gradual phase With one of the highest levels of testing, of course, they've managed to be able to keep this rate relatively low whilst then trying to get parts of the economy back open. Now, they're not the only one, there's a few other ones as well. This is France. So France started to gradually ease its lockdown on the 11th of May, so this is where you've got that green line here. So yeah, there's a little bit of skewed data here, big pop here on this bar because they redid a lot of the data to include the addition of nursing homes. The data for April 21st here was revised down after quality checks, but overall it was fairly low and level, and so therefore they started to ease the lockdown on the 11th of May. Domestic travel restrictions have not yet though been lifted, so they're still in a quite a firm degree of quarantine. The government is expected to decide at the end of the month if restaurants, cafes, and concert venues can reopen in time for the start of summer. And they'll be hoping that that, that level remains as it is at the moment, which is as low as possible. Spain easing the lockdown imposed in mid-March in phases starting on the 10th of May. That's when it began for them. So you can see a little pop the day or two after, but then it has remained even lower than probably what it was before then easing begun. About 70% of the nation in Spain, um, is not including, importantly, Madrid and Barcelona, of course, which are the most densely populated areas. But about 70% of the nation are now in the second stage after the preliminary period of preparation. The second stage in Spain is social contact is limited, smaller groups and restaurants and bars are allowed to open terraces, but only 30% capacity. Then the final country is Italy. Obviously this was the somewhat epicenter of the outbreak when it first hit mainland Europe. They began emerging from the lockdown on the 4th of May, so here's when it started to kick in. A few other things, when they had about 4 million people went back to work at this point, they were allowed to leave their homes as well citizens in the country to go for runs, walks, bars and restaurants began serving takeouts. Most shops, bars and restaurants are allowed to reopen from Monday, i.e., yesterday. And so we definitely are going to be keeping an eye on this going forward, given that latest move. There also Italians are now allowed to travel freely inside their home region and final restrictions will be lifted in June with free movement inside the country from the 3rd of June are the kind of dates to be aware of. Not all plain sailing though, because, you know, whenever you're looking at this data, it's good to look at it in a variety of different angles, so to speak. So confirmed cases has been decreasing, but I was looking at this from the WHO, the World Health Organization, and this is looking at the same thing. So you can see a decrease in the, the death and new cases reported But I was looking at the 2-week rate of change in new case curve on a 7-day moving average, and you can see here it hasn't continued that downward, uh, that kind of decline. If anything, it's leveled and increased a touch. So definitely with some of the movement that's happened in Italy over Monday, it still warrants watching. But overall, look, the main thing here is, is really the headline that I'm most interested in and, and why I think that you know, the mark— you know, news journalists pinning a lot of that extreme rally on Monday on just solely that drug, I think it's a little bit misplaced. I think that was one of the pieces of the puzzle, but I think this at the moment, uh, I think people were a lot more perhaps of the expectation that we would have been seeing some signs of higher numbers at this point, just given this phased loosening of the lockdown measures, but it hasn't happened just as yet. That's not to say though that it might not in the future, but this is how, how things sit at the moment. On that front, here are— and this is one of the keys, I guess, to making sure that those numbers remain suppressed— which is countries ramping up tests. I mean, experts, according to the FT's analysis, say they still need more for full reopenings, but this is looking at tests per 1,000 people in select nations. And you can see Italy, Norway, Germany are the most. Much lower down then would be the, the US and the UK, which comparatively the UK is testing roughly only about half the amount of people per 1,000 than Germany is, for example. But obviously we know the backstory in terms of Germany being better placed in terms of medical equipment to respond much quicker, and that probably has led to why the German shape of the control of the case has been okay so far, and they can offset to a degree the severity of the economic impact by having reopened much earlier than some of the other European nations. Okay, that's enough on the coronavirus. A few other things I wanted to talk about— well, actually, a final thing on the coronavirus just before we move on. This was just looking elsewhere. We've talked about mainland Europe and a lot elsewhere though, things are still very stressed at this point in time. Here you can see a couple of red lines, and these are looking at kind of nations outside of the regular news sphere that you're probably, um, exposed to. This is looking at Russia. Brazil has been rising rapidly. You'll remember, uh, Bolsonaro, he— at the beginning, I remember watching the news, I couldn't believe it when he was saying, look, it's the will of God to take action, and, you know, people should just go about their business as per normal. And absolutely zero action was taken. And if you look at Brazil now, it was kind of slow to pick up and start, and now it's superseded Russia as one of the, the hotbeds, the highest numbers in the world right now. So he's under extreme political pressure at the moment for that and lots of other reasons. But India, of course, we know Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, these are all areas that need to be monitored. And if you look in contrast to the blue lines of what we're seeing, these other areas like Italy and Spain, which have been on a decline for some time. So yeah, there is a little bit of a, a disconnect between where we are at those different phases And that does have then repercussions about the kind of, uh, the economic or the market movement that you're likely to see in these different asset classes or products which are geographically more sensitive development, or depending on the development of the virus as it is at that point in time. The other thing, of course, as well that's helping markets remain fairly buoyant in the equity space is that Powell has said that he's got lots of different options going forward. That was another thing that helped the Monday rally. So aside from the, the vaccine, the virus, there's also this idea that Powell is looking to alleviate concerns that they've run out of bullets. And one of the other things here that a few of the banks have been talking about the last couple of days is JP Morgan joining Goldman's that, look, the QE program that the Fed are doing is just going to go get bigger. Quantitative easing programs may be ramped up to starve off a rise in bond yields, according to JP Morgan. The level of expected increase in supply this year, about $2.1 trillion, is offsetting the $1.9 trillion demand for bonds to the tune of $200 billion, they concluded, implying upward pressure on yields. So in order to counteract that, more QE. And more QE generally, um, obviously there is other concerns later down the road given the size of the rapidly growing balance sheet the Fed. But, you know, the more QE they throw at it in the short term, the more probably positive response that you see in equity market. So that, you know, that's the kind of the final point. Moving elsewhere, I just wanted to have a quick chat about oil. And let's just have a look at oil actually from a technical point of view very briefly. This is looking a bit more at the more recent price action. It's a 30-minute candlestick chart. I was just having a look at some of the, the general trend lines that have been respected here of late, kind of 3 touches on both sides, both sides. So these will be key areas I'll be keeping an eye on going forward over the next session or two. Here then, on the overnight, we had a little bit of a run-up and a failed push through there just as Europe came in this morning. We pushed all the way back down to pivot where we are at the moment. If you have a look though, if you go back to the overnight session, it wasn't too much reaction at the time when the information came out, but you can see in the Asia-Pacific session we kind of generally moved higher. We did have overnight the API crude oil inventories, and these were somewhat symbolic. And after 15 straight weeks of builds in the crude headline, we had a drawdown, a drawdown of 4.8 million Expectations were for a build of 2.4 million, so it was a kind of bullish surprise on that metric. It's the biggest drawdown we've had since basically late December, uh, of last year. Um, interestingly as well, the Cushing number drawdown of 5 million, and as it says there, that's a record size drawdown in Cushing. And obviously Cushing, the lack of storage facility there is what already was at the heart of that run that led to negative pricing in that front month futures contract at the time. And so the alleviation, if you like, of taking oil out as that kind of demand and supply equilibrium starts to fall into place again, uh, just given how, how rapidly production rates are falling both naturally and forcefully through those OPEC+ cuts, things are starting to rebalance out a little bit in the crude market. You know, an interesting chart I was looking at here as well was— I was just having a look at the story of oil, and it really is quite amazing, the journey we've been on. I've kind of put a horizontal line here of what is actually zero price, because obviously there was that, that brief episode that we had on the 20th of April when we went negative $40. Looking at a daily continuation chart here. But yeah, the kind of main parts of the story, it's quite nice to see just where, where we are at the moment. And we had that OPEC+, you remember there was that, that meeting that we had on in March of this year, and that was when they were talking about, right, let's, let's get a deal done. The Saudis were pushing on the Russians, but the Russians didn't want to take part. We then had that massive weekend gap down where Saudi said, right, in retaliation, we're gonna, we're gonna, um, we're gonna ramp up supply and we're gonna discount prices to new customers aggressively. And that saw the price then of oil just tank after that, from around kind of $35 all the way down to $15 type level. Then Trump started inching towards potentially getting a deal done. Then we had the OPEC meeting, expectations were super sky high. They delivered a cut, but perhaps a little disappointing. Remember, actually finished lower on that day. And then the, the negative price situation with the Cushing storage issue came in and we had that blip. But look where we are now, we've come all the way back up. We're basically back to where that, that price gapped lower. There was a few people I saw that were looking at that trend line because at the time it looked like it was going to hold. Perhaps slightly interesting, we've managed to get above there actually on the close last night. And we've read— well, I'll say last night, say on Monday, we've managed to stay above it, um, yesterday, and we're still trading above it at the moment. So whether or not that's used as a bit of a launch pad then for continuation, you know, if all things remain equal, and then we continue to push up, uh, looking for that kind of gap fill then here towards those levels, which would be basically $40 a barrel again. So how quickly things can change in a short period of time. But for the moment, in near term, the intraday, obviously given the APIs last night, we'll have the DOE later. Definitely Warren's watching quite closely to see if we can see a bit of a breakout of this more kind of zoomed-in price action, which is more relevant for the intraday markets, which we're looking at for the time being. On the oil front, I did also want to just throw in the mix That was an exclusive from Reuters overnight. And it's really interesting how human behavior works, and understanding that is really quite key for being quite agile and being an effective macro trader in the intraday environment. What I mean by that is your ability to be able to pick up the nuances of when the subject matter and the kind of more definitive driving theme from a macro perspective has shifted. You think about the beginning of the year, everything was focused on tensions brewing in the, in the Persian Gulf between Saudi and Iran, and that quickly got brushed aside as soon as the pandemic hit. And of course, that has such far-reaching consequence for everything that quite rightly is— was the driving force. But the point being here is that tensions in the Gulf have not disappeared. They're still there. And so, yeah, this is an example where as the price of crude starts to steady, if people do start to become a little bit more stable with their view about the kind of economic situation being fairly priced at the moment, and, and there's no other great shocks that come negatively down the road, well then it'll only be a matter of time before these types of headlines start to draw a little bit more attention again. Um, but in alert that appeared aimed squarely at Iran, the US Navy issued a warning yesterday to mariners in the Gulf to stay 100 meters away from US warships or be risk interpreted as a threat and subject to lawful defensive measures. So, you know, that, that kind of quite confrontational rhetoric is still very much happening there, and it doesn't take a lot, as we know, to see a supply shock type headline and the price can break out very quickly. So, you know, just be aware of this, this type of thing. I mean, it's not moving markets right now, but the point I'm trying to make is this issue in, in the Gulf has not gone away. And, you know, just be mindful of, of keeping an ear out on the squawk with those guys watching the tape for us. Canada-wise, what have we got? We've already had the UK data on the inflation front, so just run you through what else there is. Still to come. You've got the Eurozone CPI, but these are final readings, so won't be looking for any market move on the back of that. We get into the US session, no major 1:30s coming out of the, the States, just Canadian data. Eurozone consumer confidence, the flash reading for May, obviously going to be heavily negative. However, I'm not sure how market-moving that's going to be. Typically that data set rarely is. And consumer confidence being very depressed at the moment, I don't think comes as any surprise at all. So I don't think I'll be really looking at that for too much action. Uh, the EIA weekly crude stocks, obviously look out for it, regular time, 3:30, um, in London, 9:30 Chicago. You've got the FOMC minutes, very little we've spoken about that, and I think probably likely to be a non-event, and hence the reason why I've given it very little airplay. If you think about it, if we fast forward to the here and now, federal funds rates have moved way more to a point of where this whole topic of negative rates has emerged, and that is a relatively more recent development. So looking back to the minutes from April really is probably quite redundant now. So not expecting a great deal from the FOMC minutes. Again, hints towards you know, what would be future policy actions and what would be the signals then would lead them to increase the discussions or debate on taking those actions are the key things generally we're looking out for from the Fed. I don't think you're going to get too much from tonight just given how dated it's now become. Speaker-wise, already mentioned Bank of England Governor Bailey is speaking to the Select Committee from the Treasury today. That's going to commence at 2:30 30 London time. Then you've got quite a bit of supply coming out from France, Germany, and the UK today, as well as the $20 billion 20-year bond auction coming out of the States. Loads more bonds auctions to come, I'm sure, just given the depths of the fiscal response that we're seeing from governments around the world. Yeah, and that's it. So any questions, feel free to leave a comment on the video. I'll reply throughout the day. Otherwise, I wish you a profitable day in the market, and I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks very much.