 Okay, very good morning. It is the 1st of April. So welcome to a new month, a new quarter and just a reminder, we have the Amplify Market Watch podcast. It's going to go out on Friday as per normal. Piers and I will record that. So despite the kind of market closure, public holiday, we'll do our best to get that out to you tomorrow morning. So don't forget to just search and subscribe for Market Watch by Amplify Live on Spotify, Apple Google and so on and so forth. So do check that out if you haven't already done so. Otherwise, let's get straight into it and start talking about what's going on in markets this morning. And I guess we've got to start chronologically with the close on Wall Street before we then review the market sentiment here at the European Open. And so just a quick look at the S&P 500 heat map. And as you can see mega cat tech names outperforming the dominant squares here, the largest market cat names firmly into the green saw the NASDAQ outperform as that 100 up around 1.5 percent. The doubt actually negative a quarter. The S&P up about a third of 1 percent. So one of the things I just wanted to comment on briefly here was Microsoft and wasn't the star performer. Our performance like the Tesla up about five percent in like Facebook up around two and a quarter. But Microsoft did see catch a late bid. So I just wanted to comment on what's a pretty cool picture really and obviously a big deal for Microsoft because it came out last night that they have signed a deal with the US Army for augmented reality headsets based on its halo lens as you can see here products and backed by the Azure cloud computing services. The contract could be up to nearly $22 billion over a 10 year period. And what this headset allows them the army to do is help train soldiers essentially and help them hone in on targets and be aware of nearby threats by overlaying contextual information on the real world in an augmented reality. So yeah pretty cool stuff. Just I mentioned that and yeah late late lifting MSF t-shirts at the end of the session. In terms of the overnight session and the Asia session kind of followed on from the general positive handle from from from the US. We also had Biden speech of course and he came out and unveiled he is going to put two trillion dollars in government spending into infrastructure alongside those two trillion dollars in higher corporate taxes. On that point Biden wants to raise corporate tax from 21 to 28 percent. So meaningful jump higher by the figure of 28 that we have heard before. So not massively surprising. And he wants to muster though additional revenue through a 21 global minimum tax calculated by a country by country basis. So it hits profits in tax havens is what the White House are trying to obtain. So on the FT article you know for those interested it kind of breaks it down the spending. Obviously this is this is the first part of to this one more focused on kind of domestic infrastructure. So transportation infrastructure manufacturing subsidy so on and so forth. How are they going to spend and how are they going to generate the revenue. And one of those revenues the biggest one of course corporate tax increases but also in there is some other things like end of fossil fuel tax breaks and anti inversion measures for example. So it could be quite interesting on the sector reactions to some of these. Overall though I'd say generally nothing too shocking here but it's quite a meaty speech with lots of little nuances to it. So probably need a bit of time to chew it over in terms of the details but markets for the open this morning from a sentiment perspective obviously have quite liked what they've heard. We remain up and around the higher levels in equity indices. I was just looking at the DAX a moment ago before I came on and I mean look at the DAX for the week just pretty much one way traffic that we've been trading since the 25th. So super impressive there having broken through 15,000 of course in the DAX future. The NASDAQ technically coming back to an interesting area of the kind of triple top that we saw on 22nd through to the 24th of the month of March retest that was seen right around the close yesterday in the US trade failed to break but we're right back up there in close proximity of it again for the NASDAQ and the S&P likewise seemingly on its way to the 4,000s it feels a bit inevitable at this point in time. Other assets gold obviously saw really nice bounce just pulling off some of the pressure that it was seeing of late and so you've managed to recover up to a point of just finding some near term resistance here you can see on the third test at around 17, 15 and a half here in the futures after a nice about turn with some of the pullback in the dollar that we saw yesterday but one thing with that the dollar is in a bit of a recovering mode at the moment in terms of the Asia pack session trades up the Dixie about one tenth this morning so both major pairs seen a touch lower. One currency pair I did want to mention was the Aussie dollar you will remember I was talking about the Aussie dollar on the Amphi live feed last week and it was a video we shared with our YouTube community but the Aussie is just breaking down a little bit in the overnight session and on the daily chart technically we've had quite a significant break of that low that we were seeing back in late February and the breakdown of that price has just led to a bit of extension with some of the recovery from yesterday's losses in the dollar in the Dixie so continues to trade firmly below now the 100 DMA line which is the blue line and does open up technically room for a bit of downside here and just to recap we were looking at the Kiwi dollar as the litmus test on the break of the 100 DMA with the same structure to the FEB and kind of March lows and when that broke it traded very heavy quite quickly interestingly now the Aussie the Kiwi excuse me has found on the pullback from that initial flush lower we saw at the end of March some resistance around the 70 psychological handle which was the floor to price in the period of consolidation through November December and we're just knocking on the door again of that low that we had on the 25th of March so any any further dollar strength be looking for a continuation and maybe a bit of further momentum on the break through that technical low and that would certainly help then further downside in sympathy with that move then with the Aussie with the Aussie probably looking down you've got the 75 psychological then 74 71 was the low that we had on the 21st of deck and then lower down more aggressive target of 74.05 would be the high that we had from late August of last year and then early part of December so so worth keeping an eye on that as that starts to play out now with some Aussie pervading weakness and some nice technicals being taken out oil prices we'll talk a little bit about OPEC in a moment pretty quiet really we had a bit of a breakdown in price seen late yesterday found a bit of a flaw at the moment around the $59 handle so really just awaiting now what the latest outcome is and confirmation of the rollover of the supply pact is expected for May from OPEC plus today a couple of other points then from the news overnight we did have the latest case in market manufacturer PMI from China so this is the case in readings so rather than the state reading we had early in the week which is looking at more state led and larger corporations this is more smaller firms and it dropped to 50 spots six last month the lowest reading actually since April of 2020 and below expectations of 51.3 not really a great deal of reaction to that local indices genuinely trading with a more positive tone just following the overall macro kind of trend at the moment the other thing you might have read about is that France are heading into a month long lock down it was announced by President Macron last night they're going to close schools and businesses starting from Saturday Italy has joined Germany as well in extending their partial shutdowns well into April with Draghi saying that current restrictions and movement on business openings in high-risk areas will remain in place until the end of April I was just having a look at you know it's a really fantastic website for tracking all things covid which I'm sure most of you will already be using but if you're not it's called our world in data and there is something that they've compiled called a stringency stringency index and what that basically is is a composite measure based on nine response indicators including things like school closures workplace closures travel bans someone and so forth and from that it can be rescale to a value of between zero and a hundred hundred being the most strict restrictions and the most loose being zero and this is just kind of focusing in the map on on Europe and as you can see here this is going to obviously become more deeper blue for France as a step up now to a more aggressive restrictions in place for a month but you can see Italy on the index at 84.26 one of the highest actually in the eurozone Greece at 87.96 the UK at 76 so interestingly overlaying kind of covid case rates we've obviously been seeing that reemerge in the lights of France Italy and other places in mainland Europe and Germany however the UK had a relative by comparison high level of of stringency index ranking if you like compared to its European peers irrespective of the fact that covid cases have remained fairly low in comparative terms so just goes to show that the quite stark difference there in strategy at the moment but obviously the UK has to face a slightly different challenge now with the restrictions on some of the astrodrugs given that consignment in India and what's happening as well going on with the EU and on that point the EU are remaining pretty firm at the moment of their stance the senior Brussels policymaker last night basically sought to quash any British hopes of attaining AstraZeneca vaccines manufactured in mainland Europe saying zero jabs will be shipped across the channel if the company failed to meet its commitments in the block had a really good chat with Mike in our Amplify live community in a session we recorded yesterday and you know quite quite key then at the moment AstraZeneca or the UK are pretty much going to put new first jabs on halt for the month of April as they look to use their Pfizer supply in order to enact then the second round of shots for those who've already received their first dose given that they'll be hitting that 12 months or 12 week kind of marker and at the moment what we're on the lookout for is the Indian manufacturing firm serum and whether the UK government I guess in some shape or form can break some break some kind of deal with them in order to then release then further consignments of that five million or so Astra vaccines that are being pent up very much so that the EU are likely to really play too many games around the Pfizer by an end tech drug even though it's manufactured to or in Europe and exported to the UK the point is that certain ingredients in that process are derived from the UK and namely in Yorkshire and so they would not want any retaliatory effect and what ultimately is Europe's key drug which is that Pfizer by end tech one and so yeah something to just be aware of the other drug news came out in the New York Times actually just a few hours ago and is about Johnson and Johnson's vaccine which really is still to hit the market but they have reportedly hit a delay due to a factory mix-up which has ruined apparently around 15 million doses so worth being aware of that for the US in particular where a lot of their focus is going to be in terms of the deployment of the early phase of manufacturing for J&J's vaccine and they have said they're still on target shouldn't impede that it was just one batch that's been affected because of a manufacturing issue that was experienced at the time okay looking at the day ahead what have we got so just skipping over the age of session with that now concluded moving over to the European morning you do get the manufacturing PMI numbers for the Eurozone and the UK but these are much final readings not expecting too much there going into the afternoon the build-up for non-farms tomorrow despite good Friday closures continues so we get weekly jobless claims we are expecting jobless claims to come in at 680 against 684 and so what does jobless claims look like well you'll remember down here on the far right hand side last week we printed at 684 in fact the jobless claims it was the lowest level since the pandemic hit the labour market in March 2020 last week and we are actually looking for further gradual improvement in the job situations therefore net a slightly lower jobless figure today in the short term claims are expected to continue to decrease the kind of passage and of the relief stimulus from the Biden government in early March and several states easing their coronavirus induced restrictions should lead to in combination with rapid pace of vaccinations for the people going into employment I guess the thing we're yet to determine is is that impeded at all by the slight uptick we've had in the last fortnight of US COVID cases and the recommendation for president in order to be a little bit more cautious about the speed of that reopening process but at the moment the jobless should continue to paint a relatively good picture if we get a 680 type reading which was kind of the forecast estimate I don't think necessarily it's particularly market moving if anything I'd probably see it as mildly positive in a sense that that pattern of improvement continues the Fed obviously aren't doing anything at the moment and that might help just generally support that overall growth kind of narrative at the moment that's that's helping just general market sentiment of yield still remaining relatively high but not now impeding the equity performance which is more focusing on the growth story more generally speaking and the other data point that we have this afternoon from the US of of significance is the ISM US ISM manufacturing PMI and I just wanted to bring this up this is like a looking back over the last 25 years or so for for this particular reading because today the expected value is for 61.3 so an improvement from the prior reading this that did happen that would put us at a multi-decade high for this reading up here come around 2004 last month's reading saw the strongest expansion in factory activity in the US since February of 2018 so you can see here the rapid recovery that we've had since the trough that we hit shortly after the national lockdown experienced almost 12 months ago in the US and so again a supportive factor for markets I think intraday short-term on a strong number and again the dollar could be interesting particularly in the context then of just generally lower levels in the euro were not too far from where we were trading back on Tuesday's low was in is in proximity and also the likes of that Aussie trade that we were just talking about a short while ago would be supported by a strong data if we get further movement higher in dollar and yields in that respect and that's that's pretty much it other than to conclude the opaque meeting looking out for any you know rumors things like that couple of the latest I've seen this morning was the JMMC has recommended the extension of compensation cuts until the end of September 2021 according to sources so overall the general theme here is we're not looking for any surprises but we could have said that last time and they did surprise by by rolling over when we were expecting moderate increase to supply this time it's the other way around so could they increase supply they could will they do that highly unlikely if they did do that it would be sure thing a negative for price in the intraday environment so really looking for confirmation if anything that they're just rolling over for the month of May including the involvement the voluntary cuts from Saudi Arabia as well they might give a minor gesture to the Russians to increase again marginally with Kazakhstan I wouldn't read really too much into that those levels are fairly insignificant to that degree comparative to the actual supply across opaque plus so yeah could well be supportive of price I guess on the confirmation make perhaps a little bit of relief but also if we get strong data low jobless high ISM that might help as well to kind of growth view and subsequently lift oil on the demand kind of side of things in the short term kind of sentiment basis but that's it so again don't forget to check out the podcast literally just just jump on Spotify hit the follow button and then it will just update automatically when we we launch the or release the next episode on Friday morning cool all right I will see the guys in Amphi live community in the in the discord room otherwise for everyone else on YouTube hit that like button and subscribe to channel very much appreciate it have a fantastic long weekend for Easter take care and I'll catch you later thanks very much