Worldwide COVID-19 Cases Top 10mln With Global Deaths Above 500,000

Global confirmed cases of COVID-19 go over 10 million at the weekend, and the death toll now over 500,000. The state of Florida alone in the United States now has more new confirmed cases of coronavirus than all of Europe. I'm Anthony Cheung, I'm the head of market analysis here at Amplify Trading, and this is your look ahead for markets. For this week. So looking at the charts then, first of all, and what is going on, we've got a degree of slight risk-off sentiment given some of those headlines that I've just said. Plenty more things for me to discuss with you guys as well for the week ahead. But in the currency markets, we've got a little bit of a difference in the way the dollar is behaving this morning. Actually, Dixie is trading down about 0.3%. So both major currency pairs here in the top left-hand corner are on the front foot, up around 40 to 45 pips each in EURUSD. The left and cable in the center. Now one of the main reasons for this is that if we look at this chart here, this is looking at the US 7-day rolling average of new cases against that of the EU. As you can see here, quite a distinct divergence between the two lines which had otherwise been relatively tracking each other over the period of April and May during the height of really the, the acceleration and peak of the first phase of the virus. So At the moment, this secondary wave definitely much more evident in the United States, which of course were one of the last countries in the developed world to go into a stringent lockdown and also one of the first nations to reopen a little bit more aggressively than what we've seen in other parts of the world and mainland Europe. So here then, I think what's a bit different this morning from what had been the case last week and the week before— if you remember, whenever we've had risk-off sentiment, generally the dollar then has strengthened. As a flight to quality, the global reserve currency, people flocking to safe havens in that extent. But this morning, quite interestingly, the opposite is happening. The dollar actually is weakening quite considerably. And I think this is to do really with this chart, in that if you think about the dynamics, then if the US economy is going to have to halt or roll back some of the aggressive reopenings, some of these most popular states in America like Texas, for example, which has seen record numbers coronavirus new cases at the weekend, well then that's going to hamper the economic recovery of America. Perhaps then that's going to lead to the Fed having to offer more in the way of various forms of stimulus, and that's going to weaken inherently the dollar at this point. And if the economic recovery picks up then in the rest of the world, i.e., in Europe or the UK and elsewhere, well then perhaps then now you're starting to see then a currency strength going into these other places away from the US dollar. Uh, interestingly, you know, when we look at the, the EUR/USD pair and we start looking on a weekly, uh, there is certainly a, a longstanding trend line going back to 2018, which you can see that we've, we've tested a few times before here, um, in the summer of 2018, in the beginning of this year, and it has held the price action on the test that we had, uh, in June as well. Just a few weeks ago. So at the moment, be interested to see, obviously, as that— if this continues, if the price of the euro continues to strengthen against the dollar, then up towards some of these rejected highs that we've had through this month. And then that trend line coming in could be an interesting area around the 114 handle to keep an eye on in the more medium term. Otherwise, in the other asset classes, equity index futures generally lower. The DAX down about 50 points this morning. Gold up then about $5 or so. T-notes though are down about 3 ticks, having gapped up slightly, just edging lower in the overnight session, but finding some support here at the Asia-Pac low and also the pivot level just below in the 10-year. Oil markets kind of tracking this overall sentiment, which we have seen quite linked then to the kind of overall pessimism that can develop when these COVID-19 cases start to increase globally, particularly in the US, and the impact that that can have subsequently on demand. So oil prices Um, also continue to track lower, down around 72 cents. A bit of support there found in WTI crude at around today's S1 in the daily pivots. But any push below there, if that were to materialize this afternoon, and we'll be eyeing the lows that we've seen last Thursday, which would be down towards the $37 handle, uh, to keep an eye on. So let's just run through some of the headlines and talk about what's moving markets this morning. And This is it. This is your headline figures. So as I just mentioned, then confirmed cases do top 10 million, the biggest number being in the US, Brazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdom. It has then seen a couple of things I want to talk about. In the US, first of all, I guess looking at the shape, if you like, of the, the 7-day average And as you can see here, the peak of new cases then superseding that of the first wave because we never really pared back to a great degree, unlike countries like the UK and Europe, before the reopening commenced. So total confirmed cases now in America, um, you know, making up a good 25 to 30% proportion of the overall global cases, with the death toll now coming up to 126,000. Those main areas which we've been looking at continue to see incredibly steep trajectories at the moment. So of course, as we go through both today and the rest of this week, it's now a main staple of the economic kind of calendar of events for the day that you need to be aware of, that being at around that 3:00, 3:30 PM time London when we start to get the latest daily updates and tracking then about the level of increase from one day to the next. And you know, you can see areas like Florida accelerating, but across the board here, really California, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, some of the key ones I'm looking at at the moment. Um, here is looking at a pretty useful resource as well. I did have quite a few questions last week about how can we track the kind of R rate, the reproductive rate of the virus on a state level. And you can see here Nevada, uh, by far and above the highest at the moment with an estimated figure of around 1.64. And again, 1, as we can see here with the red line, is the, the kind of threshold, if you like, in order to contain the exponential growth of the virus. You can see here definitely more above that than below at this point if you're looking at the entire nationwide picture in the US. So the highest reproductive rate at the moment in Nevada, Montana, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Wyoming, and Oklahoma for the time being. Uh, but closely followed by other areas like Texas, for example, which is at 125. And Texas, interesting, because COVID-19 positive test rates surged to 14.31% as of yesterday. That's the highest for the second most popular US state since the pandemic emerged. And actually, if you look at, uh, going back over the last couple of weeks, the rate has effectively tripled. Given fairly in fitting with the reopening of that, in particular, that state in particular. Other global areas that are capturing some headlines this morning outside of that, in other areas like India and Brazil, for example, is Australia. They're facing a concerning, quote, according to their authorities, spike in coronavirus infections with 75 new cases reported in the state of Victoria on Monday. And then also there's some reports, um, from China at the weekend which was basically saying that a county in the northern part of China has been sealed off. This was several miles outside of Beijing but very close proximity, um, where they've sealed off around 400,000 residents placed under tighter restrictions and quarantine after a dozen or so COVID-19 cases were reported. And these are all being linked to that breakout that we saw in that cluster case in that marketplace about 2 weeks ago in Beijing. So still, you can see how that can manifest and grow quite quickly from that point on. But China again adopting quite aggressive tactics. And over the weekend, China's central bank coming out saying we'll implement new monetary tools to make sure liquidity continues to reach the economy. The PBOC said they would increase proportion of small smaller company credit and manufacturing loans. So again, continuing to do everything that it possibly can to, to support the economic recovery. Interestingly as well, we are going to get some Chinese data coming out this week. In particular, in the overnight session, we get the official manufacturing PMI from China. Now, this is expected to come in— the consensus estimate is for 50 spot 6. So that would be indicative of still being in expansionary territory, confirming then quite a, a V-shaped solid recovery and confidence in China. But underlying this, a lot of what I've been reading from various different analysts is this idea that the actual new orders is what's going to be impacted. And although things looking quite good now, really the fate of whether this economic story of recovery can continue in China is largely dependent on really what happens with the rest of the world. And at the moment that is looking relatively precarious, particularly in countries like China's biggest customer, America, where it's looking like then they might have to go into new phases of lockdown to contain this latest outbreak. And that's going to have subsequent impact on the new orders that the US are going to have to put into China, and that's going to have implications for the, for the Chinese economy. So yeah, plenty going on. And with everything I've just covered, this is my macro menu that I write and publish every Sunday via my Twitter account. So there's my handle if you want to read the piece in more detail. But on here, just to make things as easy as possible, I've put here basically several clickable hyperlinks to all the different websites and systems that I use in order to monitor the COVID-19 situation. So including some of those I've just shown you. So check that out, they're all linked up so you can just click on it. And I think they're definitely worth bookmarking on your browser as we go forward, because markets continue to remain ultra-sensitive to developments on this front at the moment. Um, what does this mean then? What's the knock-on effect? Well, interesting, there was a CBS survey that came out this morning and it was talking about only 5% of Americans in that survey think things are going very, very well at the moment, against 40% who said they're going very badly, according to a survey taken from the end of last week. Now, what does that mean? Well, it does mean that Biden continues through really no gain of his own, more somewhat self-inflicting of Trump. He's obviously taken a bit of a beating in the polls on the back of some of the handling of the Black Lives Matter kind of movement, and also of course on the kind of picking up and reacceleration of COVID-19 across various states. States with his kind of move to try and reopen the economy sooner than most other nations. And so, yeah, interesting to continue to look at this. Again, if you refer back to my macro menu, I do give some more opinion and talk about this in a little bit more detail, because one of the things, even despite the, the Biden gap and lead quite significantly over Trump at the moment, I still personally believe that Trump will win the election come November. As it stands as of today. But instead of me explaining that now, again, just go to that macro menu and you can see my, my logic behind that kind of forecast. I did ask you guys at the weekend on Twitter, around 725 votes, so a fairly decent sample size, about what you thought and who was going to win the election at this point. And quite interestingly, you're pretty much split down the middle. It's kind of like one of those Brexit vote situations. But Trump just edging it slightly, 51 to 49% would be the latest. Elsewhere, Brexit. So actually Brexit officials on both sides, they're going to be meeting today for the first time face to face, I think since March, having done that virtually of course since the lockdown. So the chief negotiator David Frost will meet with the EU deputy chief negotiator Alborolo. And they'll meet in Brussels. And at the moment, in terms of these talks, this is what's coming out of the FT: Brussels says Britain's silence on subsidies risks hampering intensified talks starting, uh, today. It's still state aid and fisheries are the stumbling blocks. Reports in UK press have suggested that senior MPs in the Conservative Party are urging Brexit negotiators to reject any type of Brexit compromises offered by Brussels, uh, this week. Just to remind you then, we are of course coming into a, a kind of meaningful period in the negotiation timetable, and that being that tomorrow does in fact mark then the deadline for the submission from the UK to request an extension of the transition period. Now that looks unlikely to happen, so here's what we have then. Going forward starting today through to July 3rd. So effectively this week they're back to the negotiating table in person. Um, then we get to the last chance, which is obviously tomorrow, the final deadline for the transition period, which at this point in time is looked to set to remain to the end of this year. We then have soft deadlines on July 1st, the original timetable. The EU and UK should by now have reached an accord on fisheries a precondition for a trade deal, as well as an accord on what access London's financial services firms will have to the single market after year-end. So if you were going to monitor, I guess, these Brexit talks and you're looking for key trigger points that we are progressing and moving down the right path here, that's really the areas you need to look for, which is fisheries importantly, and also state aid, and also access to the financial services for the single market as well would be key areas. July 6th then, chief negotiators and their teams hold specialized discussions, and then it really ramps up now. So instead of it being every 3 weeks that they were talking, they're effectively talking every week going forward. July 13th, the chief negotiators and teams hold more discussions. A 5th round of talks scheduled to take place in London then, 20th to 24th. More discussions at the end of the month, then a 6th round of talks in mid- August, an extraordinary meeting of the EU leaders in mid-September, and then quite a lot of people focused on that mid-October EU leaders meeting in Brussels for when they want to get some kind of deal then done, at least a simple trade deal at that point, in order to see it through the end of the year. So I'll, I'll share all these dates with you in a tweet shortly so you've got them all to hand. But one thing that you're going to hear later today is Boris Johnson. He's basically going to come out and deliver a speech today. And what can you expect from the Prime Minister? Well, he's going to promise that the government will build, build, build its way out the biggest crisis for 75 years with extra spending for schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. So this is kind of similar to what I think you're going to see from the likes of Donald Trump as well. Is that in order to offset this economic reality that we are facing at the moment, it's just going to be this continuation of any means in order to see and support economic growth going forward. And obviously in the Western world, the way that democracy works, where governments tend to be quite short-termist, so lesser focused on the long-term implications of the accumulation of debt and more so about just trying to kickstart start the economy and get the biggest bang for your buck, you can expect pledges of another large-scale government spending to be coming from, from Boris Johnson, who again has been looking a little less favorable in the polls just given some of the latest COVID situation. And interestingly, over the weekend, similar to what I was discussing in some of the briefings last week, you know, more scenes over the weekend, you know, following some of the, some of the good weather we had. I think it was on Friday, a little bit less so at the weekend, but you beaches packed across Britain. You know, in London there's been lots of meetups in parks and inappropriate social gathering. If I was putting it politely, I'd say illegal raves would be the other way of saying it, but they've been popping up all over London. I even could hear one going off last night on a Sunday night. So definitely as we go into the July 4th, so this weekend, which is the next phase phase of reopening in the UK. It's going to be so interesting to see whether or not that the UK can keep that level suppressed of what we've had in that COVID-19 case. I mean, if you look at here, United Kingdom has generally seen a continuous decline and divergence then with the US. But here then lies the risk as we go forward over the next 2 or 3 weeks, given the incubation period of the virus. And then the reopening we've got at the weekend, whether or not we start to see something similar to the US or not, which obviously would be incredibly politically difficult for Boris to, to manage going forward. So worth tracking. Looking at the calendar then, just to sum things up for the rest of the day, from the speaker's point of view, a variety of different central banks are scheduled. And I think this is quite as to be expected I think a lot of these central banks just want to show a degree of control and calmness to this developing global pandemic. And so I think you can expect lots of speeches as we go throughout the, the week. The ones in particular I'm quite interested in are Fed's— or excuse me, Bank of England's Andy Haldane. He's the chief economist of the Bank of England, again was the dissenter against the group in order that he did not foresee the need now to go ahead with more additional quantitative easing, which the Bank of England did do. So be interested to see whether or not that his perspective has changed or not. And then on the US side, Fed's Powell and US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, they testify just about the various different ongoing stimulus packages and lending facilities that have been adopted in order to support the economy. So for Mnuchin, I don't think this is going to be a particularly market-moving event, but one of the things that we are looking out for, given the expiration of some of the government's programs towards the end of July, whether or not and how far they've progressed with this idea of additional, more stimulus measures from the government, of which I am expecting to be— going to be forthcoming. But in what shape and in what timeline is that going to follow is going to be quite key. You know, Trump obviously last week was talking about that he's in favor of issuing second stimulus check and so on. From Powell's side, I don't think you're going to get too much, but do note as well Wednesday night you do get the FOMC minutes, and this will be where they unveiled those latest projections. They said the interest rates were going to stay basically where they are through 2022, so I guess I'm looking for any further insight in towards then what would need to happen or evolve in the economy for them to kind of start to tweak that, that going forward. And if we were to see a materially worse situation unfold in the future, what other policy tools or measures could be under consideration would be things I'd be looking out for in those minutes. Um, other than that, the other thing to be definitely aware of is that we've got a holiday-shortened week. So as you can see, it is of course Independence Day in the US this weekend. So actually Friday is a market closure in America ahead of that, so everything's going to be squeezed into 4 instead of traditionally 5 days. So I do think that needs to be considered when you look at the, the week as a whole because it will be a little bit more front-loaded than usual. That does mean then we've got the, the regular kind of jobs data, or at least constituents from things like Manufacturing PMI in the US. You've got ADP ISM Manufacturing coming all on Wednesday. So it's going to be quite a lot of data squeezed into those days. And then Thursday, of course, we get the latest US non-farm payroll report. So that's coming out on a Thursday, uh, this week. Now expectations there are we are going to create again, uh, millions of jobs, and the unemployment rate is expected to decrease once again. But overall, I don't really see too much in the way of payrolls really causing much in, in terms of a long-lasting way of impacting market sentiments about what we think about the economic future going forward. I actually think non-farm payrolls, despite any short-term volatility, is relatively redundant. We have seen US data, of course, things like home sales, manufacturing activity, even recent payroll reports have all surprised to the upside, enough in fact the fact that the Citi Surprise Index is at a record high at the moment. And even if the, the data this Thursday follows that pattern, I mean, the unemployment rate should move lower, but I guess caution is warranted because it's not a reliable indicator. It understates the true rate of joblessness because of the way the methodology is and about people being furloughed. It's not really that accurate a figure at the moment. And average hourly earnings will fall sharply. Um, but this is a statistical effect caused by lots of relatively low-earning workers regaining employment, which drags the average level of hourly wages lower. So just think about things like hospitality, for example. So as they come back into work in the reopening that we have seen over the past 4 weeks over the reference period, that's going to drag that average rate lower. So Again, it means that average hourly earnings basically are meaningless in that respect. So yeah, a couple things to, to consider. So that's it really for me. If you go on the Amplify YouTube channel, Sam has put out his video for the week ahead, technical levels to be aware of. So you've got that. And Eddie did a fantastic video as well, you can see here, about the Wirecard fraud explained. It's had over 10,000 hits over the weekend, so definitely worth checking out. But that's it from me, so I'm gonna wish you a very good week ahead. Any questions at all, feel free to leave a comment, and yeah, I'll catch you tomorrow morning. Thanks very much.