 Okay, hello and I hope you had a very merry Christmas and looking forward to the New Year celebrations even if they are at home I know it's a bit of an unusual situation, but hope everyone has enjoyed the break I know a lot of people have had some well-deserved kind of downtime over the last week or so So I wanted to do a quite short video bit of a macro update on really three key things that markets are really focused on or were at least before we left and that being Brexit, US stimulus and of course COVID-19, the situation with the actual virus and the new variant and also the latest with vaccines given some of the AstraZeneca news and the approval we've seen here in the UK earlier this week. So going to get straight into it and talk about a couple of these things and starting off with the COVID situation and what I've put together here is an update firstly looking in a bit more detail at the UK situation and the reason why I think that's particularly important to look at is because this is where the new variant is set to have emanated from and therefore now that is spreading globally as I'm going to update you with some of the first cases being identified now just yesterday in the US as well as in lots of other countries now I think looking at how it's performing in the UK could act as a good indicator of how it might perform elsewhere amongst other things so let's get straight into it. I'm going to quickly run over some of the COBRA slides that the UK government issued yesterday and I'll quickly go over this in short form just to get you fully up to speed if you haven't been keeping up to speed kind of day by day with these these matters. So one of the main things here is how quickly over the last two weeks UK case rates have increased they've in fact doubled in the course of 14 days and you can see here the difference between the 10th of December to the 24th of December so even this data in itself is barely dated now by a week or so so things have definitely changed and we've seen that witnessed the restrictions changed we've seen in the UK named this week and so a couple of other things then looking at the number of people going into hospital with COVID-19 now this is kind of one of the more I guess more concerned areas that we're looking at at the moment given the fact that just generally from a seasonal perspective these are tough months on the national health service particularly in the UK over the course of January February given the temperature changes there's slips and trips and things like that generally increased the number of accidents and so on and one of the main things here is breaking up the UK into different areas on a regional basis and looking at how the virus has really developed and as we've known in the South East and London in particular and you can just really see this over how the number of people going to hospital has really rapidly increased in areas here in London very sharply whereas comparative to say Northern Ireland Scotland has relatively plateaued at this point in time the main thing here then is looking at a couple of different things here we're looking at the estimated number of people testing positive for COVID-19 in the community in England has continued to increase so as a statistic the number now is one in 70 here you can see kind of two meaningful milestones in regards to the restrictions imparted by the UK government national restrictions introduced in England on the 5th of November and you can see here shortly after that was adopted we started to see a decrease in the number however soon as national restrictions were ended on the 2nd of December that's when we started to see an acceleration and throw into the mix there the the introduction of this new variant of the virus now the percentage testing positive of the new variant is increasing in almost every region in the UK so when we start actually drilling down into these numbers although as I just mentioned it might look more severe in some areas like London and Southeast in fact looking at the blue line which is the new variant compatible against other variants say from the decreases that generally we were seeing in the original state of COVID-19 the blue line is moving higher across the entire country at this point it's just that the acceleration is more evident in London the southeast and the east of England and the reason why then in terms of that tier four restriction levels has graduated in from those areas to around the rest of the country well this has led to then is this the tier four which is stay at home is the black colour and you can see that pretty much dominates now the entire United Kingdom we've had a number of changes the new fastest spreading strain of the virus is basically driven daily infection rates to a record level more people hospitalized death daily death rates are close to the peak that we saw in the first wave in the spring in the UK the reopening of schools as I'm sure you've read has been delayed and the government that says restrictions could be tightened further so you know on this point although cable on the FX market at the moment is kind of having this relief moment on the back of the conclusion of a fairly orderly if I can call it that compromise over brexit to get the deal done which is which has happened now we'll get to that in a moment in terms of the more finer details but the the unknowns here could be associated with which could cap some of the brexit upside relief for sterling on further national lockdowns that might become necessary for the UK government to adopt as we go into the first week of January which is probably then where we're going to see the real tangible effect of the loosening albeit over a shortened period originally planned of the Christmas restrictions so something to be mindful of I think definitely that could be something to look out for in the first week of January is a movement into much more onerous restrictions the government has already kind of floated the idea of that being a possibility of which of course it is the likelihood of it happening I think is relatively high and so as I said that could offset any of the short-term positivity in any upside movement in the pound doesn't mean necessarily that the pound can't go higher it just means that any kind of breakaway beyond smashing through 140 could be a little bit more tougher than perhaps otherwise it might have been if the virus was more suppressed at this point in time um having a look then elsewhere globally I'm going to focus really on the main areas here being the UK and the US going to leave Europe for the moment and the rest of the world but I'll comment a little bit more on that on the latter when we get to the vaccine conversation but here just having a look at the US looking at cases deaths and hospitalizations and in the US a slower than expected vaccine rollout in the US and may be about to be met by this new strain of the coronavirus officials in two states Colorado and California have said that they've now discovered cases of the more contagious variant which is said to be emanated from from Britain there's no evidence that new variant makes people sicker but it appears to be much more contagious as we know than the older form some reports varying from around 50 to 70 percent in terms of its how transmissible it is so here the interesting thing on these charts is the fact that case rates have come off their initial peak but hospitalizations are continuing to increase so again this is one of the reasons why there could be beyond the actual markets are very much focused on kind of deaths and vaccines but there's there's definitely going to be a more longer term impact of what COVID-19 has had on other people receiving treatment for a whole variety of other medical diseases that things that have otherwise had to be delayed in that respect so I definitely think there's repercussions of this and and it really does show how necessary it is to have an effective rollout of the vaccine as we go forward into 2021 the other things looking at here are as I said COVID patients in hospitals in America you know well in excess this is by day of a hundred thousand that that steepness of that curve is flattening slightly but it's still moving higher for the time being and one of the things that the US is really quite different from the likes of mainland Europe is it really failed to suppress a lot of these rates in the earlier first and kind of the tri-state and sunbelt outbreaks that the the levels really never really dropped a considerable amount on the case front which has meant that hospitalizations have resulted have remained relatively high and now as you can see we're double of what we were at any other point in time through 2020 so let's talk a little bit about the the vaccines because there's definitely things to be to be talked about here and time really is of the essence and looking at America this is a map looking at vaccines across America I've got a couple of stats here that it's worth bearing in mind there's a bit of context around this idea of of how quickly can the inoculation of a population take place which is obviously going to be imperative for the economic recovery to take hold so here vaccinations in the US began on December 14th with healthcare workers so obviously frontline workers being the ultimate priority here and so far 3.05 million doses have been administered according to state-by-state tally conducted by Bloomberg and cooperating that data with the CDCP so the Center for Disease Control and Prevention across the US then from a percentage point of view that means that only 0.9% of the population have been vaccinated so far and 25% the shops distributed to states have been administered and this is quite an interesting thing that I was reading about yesterday and I was looking at that a lot of these US states have been administered the drug and in the US it's very much more a story of Pfizer, BioNTech and the Moderna's shots but the amount that's been distributed is well the amount that's been distributed I should say is quite different from the amount that's been actually administered and there's a few reasons why people have said that might be the case now as you can see here only around kind of an average of 20 to 25% well if you're looking at US totals 24.6% of shots have been actually administered from what are actually available so why is there being such a slow take up of this if it is so important why isn't it just straight in there into the system to try and offset both the pandemic from a health consequence and also from the point of impact on the economy well it's a couple things officials are blaming a delicate vaccine with complex storage requirements remember the US have gone quite full in to the Pfizer BioNTech side of things which one of the biggest pitfalls there is the ultra cool storage that's necessary for that vaccine at minus 70 degrees Celsius that has caused an incredible amount of difficulties uncertainty over the supply of doses so remember a lot of these are two-shot processes or nearly all of them are including AstraZeneca which we'll talk about in a moment and then the other things are local health agencies already facing historic challenges at the moment remember seasonally as well there's a lot of constraints on available staffing so there's a combination of different things and then also the idea that some people are still a little bit skittish about the safety-ness of the actual vaccine in itself whether rightly or wrongly and influenced by many other different forces perhaps online people are a little bit apprehensive of being the first one to take the shot so there's a number of things here at play I think in America which is impeding at the moment a little bit of the uptake whether it's a an actual function of the vaccine which I think was always the problematic thing about Pfizer and their particular drug and technology that they were using and then also the actual willingness and the ability to roll out this vaccine is what's always been challenging we've always talked about which ultimately is going to be something you're going to have to monitor to how quickly then the government can hit its targets now the U.S. is managing state allocations of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as well as Moderna shot with the goal of getting 20 million doses distributed by early January however I can tell you now that that's that's not going to be met the U.S. administration has even come out and admitted so remember so far where they've only done three million they're talking about doing another 17 million by the end of January it's highly unlikely that that's going to happen so they're already missing their targets you know so this is something to be aware of particularly now I think in America that in Colorado in California this new variant of the virus has been identified so all those case rates are just off the high is hospitalizations that elevated so a reacceleration of cases in an already stretched infrastructure to deal with this with the difficulties in rolling out what is quite a sophisticated vaccine in the case of Pfizer I think could be problematic to people's timelines about the adoption of this virus to give you an idea although it's probably a little bit dated I was listening to Anthony Fauci the medical expert in the U.S. he was on speaking on the news a few days ago and he was talking about this idea of looking at kind of into early Q2 for when people could start this phase in coming back to work in America and then a degree of normality happening where people can go about more normal activities perhaps not happening until the fall so we're looking at a fall 2021 narrative here with the vaccine and and certainly the more acute point of that from financial markets is going to be early in the year so definitely January where we're going to get more of an idea about how how well this whole rollout vaccination program is functioning so a couple of other things here to be aware of going to go through a few more slides one of the other main pieces of news you've probably heard of just a few days ago is AstraZeneca it's AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford their vaccine won UK clearance now it's been a lot of coverage about the authenticity of their results about what happened with this half shot double shot and so on the efficacy rate not quite as high originally as what we were seeing as some of the other firms like Pfizer and Moderna but a couple of things here that I think are very important one is firstly what's the situation the UK well now that they've given it a UK clearance the vaccine will be prioritized for the country's most fundrable groups so the shots are going to start on the 4th of January so Monday according to the government their two dose shot is the early leader in terms of pre-purchase agreements and that's what I'm looking at here on the left hand side you might have seen me tweeting about this a few days ago at the moment pre-purchase agreements on the Astra vaccine would cover around 1.46 billion people that's more than twice as much as their nearest competitor and if you actually look at it here this graph I've already just taken a snippet of the top of it you can see here the distribution goes far and wide selling or producing this at cost so there's a number of benefits here that are much better in favor of Astra comparative to others doesn't have that situation of the storage it's being done at cost which means it can be distributed to third world nations as well it's not more affordable those that lack infrastructure obviously it can be just stored in a normal refrigeration unit makes it more usable in those types of conditions the other things are Astra Zeneca has generally much better manufacturing capability than someone like Moderna for example they've also got very strong distribution networks globally as well unlike Pfizer which is more North American focused so there's a lot going here positive actually reasons for for markets to be up at the moment you know you've had two you've had a couple of big risks here coronavirus but now you've got Astra coming in and Astra I really do think is a bit of a game changer we still need to await a little bit more definitive details about some of the studies that are happening at the moment about its efficacy rate and particularly with all the vaccines on the new variant but overall the Astra one is so much more could be adopted on a worldwide basis which is ultimately quite key for eradicating the virus on a global level in that respect so that taking care of the virus you've had a stimulus deal done in the US you've had a Brexit deal done and hence the reason why equity markets are finishing the year on generally some of the highest levels on record when we're looking at the US you know oil markets trading at a 48 hand or you know I think all of these are warranted for this point in time but as I've just discussed with some of the UK situation with COVID there's a lot of things you still need to monitor for now so here you can see UK has agreed to buy more than 350 million doses of COVID-19 shots but AstraZeneca heavily is the one of which they've invested in at this point in time the government in the UK is aiming for 2 million people to receive their first dose of either the Oxford vaccine or the Pfizer jab within a fortnight as part of a major ramping up of the inoculation program now that is quite important the UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock has come out and said the AstraZeneca shot added into the mix the country will be through the COVID crisis by the spring I think Matt Hancock's got a political death wish by making such statements like that I find that incredibly irresponsible to kind of put that date on there but therefore he's a politician so he plays a different you know he's playing to a different beat he needs to make sure that the government's looking proactive but leaving all of that aside you know we're not going to be through the COVID crisis by the spring I can tell you that now but the point being is that the AstraZeneca shot compounds then hugely the impact then of the inoculation programs because it has much larger distribution potential than some of the other vaccines that have been the front riders like Pfizer and Moderna Astra is really the potential game changer here the other thing I thought was quite interesting was BioNTech their CEO was speaking about a week ago and he was quite bullish when questioned when this new variant was coming to the forefront that his vaccine would still be still be valid it would still be effective but one of the things I thought was interesting he said that if needed they could be able to provide a new vaccine technically within six weeks now whether that is achievable or not whether that is just a company CEO talking their book read of it what you will but again I think the market might take some assurance out of that that look at the moment I think there's still really concrete evidence still yet to come out in regards to this new variant which of course is mutating all of the time and whether the vaccine is still going to be efficient our assumption is it will at this point but that needs to be tracked of course but if they can you know this isn't about going back to square one they already are equipped now with better knowledge now than we had nine months ago or 10 months ago so it wouldn't like be going all the way back to beginning if they could turn it around six weeks well then I think that's a massive positive in that sense and again helps to underpin and support say global equity valuations on one of these major macro risks at the moment here's just looking at the global vaccine vaccination campaign so as I said less than 1% of the US population have received the vaccine at this point in time that's not forgetting that of course there's a two-shot system with this so most of these people are only receiving the first part so far China obviously hugely insignificant at this point in time I mean for China to give you up to speed they have given conditional approval for the first general use of a locally made COVID-19 vaccine paving the way for distribution both home and abroad the national medical products administration in China said the regulator had agreed to a public release of vaccines developed by Sinopharm a state-owned pharmaceutical company the approval there was after Sinopharm said the drug had achieved a 79% efficacy rate in late-stage clinical trials medical experts though such as the way the western world views a lot of information that comes out of China a little bit skeptical because they warned that the data things like the efficacy rates and the trial data has had a lack of independent oversight of that clinical data loopholes in test design of undermine the vaccines effectiveness the only countries that have adopted that Chinese vaccine so far are the UAE and Bahrain but I don't know for sure but one would make the assumption then that there's probably some kind of tired toward the investment and trade between those two countries as to why probably they've adopted the Chinese vaccine more than others I would imagine perhaps I'm wrong all right well let's move on that's enough of hopefully that's got you up to speed generally aware we are at the moment with the vaccine situation so the rest is going to be very brief because it's predominantly very much based on that as the main theme still in markets and probably still will be when we come back to doing the morning normal morning briefings on Monday so brexit what exactly is happening well finally finally a deal as expected you know if you've been watching the briefings that I do you know this was my kind of base case view for a number of months that it was really between mid to late deck would get a deal and we've arrived at a future relationship bill with the EU being agreed yesterday so that happened yesterday that's brought then this new bill into UK law it was backed by the House of Commons of a vote of 521 to 73 on Wednesday after parliament and MPs were recalled after Christmas break it's been also ratified by the EU now here's a look at the pound the pound has had a what I would classify as a light relief rally on confirmation of this definitely it removes for sure now the kind of worst case disorderly no brexit situation that now is off the table and but the the the relief fairly contained and the main reason for that is that if you actually look from where we were really going through October December the pound was already moving higher you know me making a call that the deal would come in that timeframe being right is really not that impressive because it was as expected really I think that compromises were always going to come on both sides and seemingly that that is what has happened as I said the upside for this currency pair can it continue going higher yes it can technically obviously good round targets at 140 a break above there gets us then looking up at 145 and above but one in the short term I think we've really got to be conscious of the fact that some of that might be capped on the upside by increasing the onerous restrictions being imparted in the UK and why the Great Britain as that new variant continues to see quite an acceleration in cases what actually happens I'm filming this and in just a few hours time actually before you crack open the champagne for New Year Britain then officially brexit is kind of done at this point although definitely not over so a couple of things are going to change the trade deal then between Boris Johnson and the EU chiefs avoids the need for import taxes and tariffs which many businesses have feared but there will still be major changes to rules on travel immigration commerce living and working abroad the UK police will lose instant access to EU wide databases on criminal records things of that nature and one of them the main things here that was really not so evident in this deal which is why there's still a lot of work to go on behind closed doors is the area of services and particularly things like financial services and so on which even the UK government admitted themselves was very light touch in terms of its details so the next steps here are on the first of January the brexit transition period officially ends the trade deal will have taken provisional effect depending on the full approval of European Parliament remember this was that idea then that there's kind of a grace period if you like before then it gets ratified probably more like in February so then the European Parliament will analyze now the terms of the agreement its separate committees on trade and foreign affairs will offer their opinions in a final vote like to be an early feb one important thing here is MEPs will need to give their consent to the deal being EU only accord which means it does not need ratification in national member state parliaments that they are these MEPs expected to vote overwhelmingly in favor of the deal as I said there's still quite a few things here to to muddle through on the particularly the service sector side of things which obviously is incredibly important for the UK how much of this is a real tangible impact are we going to feel I guess we're going to know in another day's time and once it's bedded in in beginning of January of what that looks like but for the moment the market and rightly so fairly calm in nature for the time being and I would expect that to be then to remain the case and then the last thing I wanted to talk about just to wrap things up is the US stimulus situation the republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has rejected a proposal for increasing US stimulus payments to $2,000 per person remember Trump was calling for that maybe two weeks ago I said at the time that this is purely a tactical play in a in a way for Trump to frame then given his departure soon from the White House that he made every attempt to kind of help the common man by more than doubling up from the 600 kind of stimulus paycheck to 2000 supporting the Democrats in this case and it's his own party that's led him down I absolutely never expected $2,000 to go through the $900 billion economic relief package has been signed by Trump already it means that the means tested $600 paycheck goes out for adults but again Mitch McConnell who retain the upper chamber of congress for another two years if republicans win at least one of the senate runoff elections in georgia next week has continued to resist this pressure so for the moment I think most importantly a deal has been done for now I think this is more of a good short-term stop gap but as Biden was calling for a few weeks ago more stimulus is probably going to be necessary the interesting thing there is that georgia senate runoff because if republicans don't win there and we do hand then change to a blue rave situation then that could be quite meaningful in terms of the stimulus side of things because as I said the democrats have been more aligned for more beefier ways of helping people with these stimulus checks and that would have repercussions then for the likes of the economy but I don't see that happening I see the senate being held by the republicans that means McConnell is still going to be the biggest thorn in the government side to play down these types of these situations at the moment so overall then just summarizing everything I've covered there's been some positive developments for sure and I think that's what's led to a relatively stable market going into year end so any fear of a kind of end of year spillover in markets creating volatility has not happened we've had a brexit deal we've had a us stimulus deal albeit more is needed and albeit on brexit more details are needed on the service sector but in the short term relief you've had AstraZeneca come out and as we've discussed could be a potential game changer for many different reasons and as such then the markets are taking that as a positive signal despite still the general worsening of the covid situation under this new variant we're seeing in many places around the world at this point in time so there's a couple of things here to be optimistic about there's a couple of things to definitely monitor and there's a couple of things that if they were to change could well be meaningful for sure for markets and particularly I think the main focal point as we go into the reopening when everyone comes back from their Christmas turkey and they've had their new year hangover gone then the focus is still very much going to be on covid 19 and the vaccine so things haven't really moved on a great deal a lot of the emphasis if anything is going to increase on that subject matter given the fact that short term things like brexit and us stimulus have been resolved at least for the time being all right i'm going to leave it at that i know fairly lengthly but wanted to cover a lot of things there in a bit more detail hope it was useful again i hope you've had a really good break if you're watching this on youtube don't forget to hit that thumbs up help the algorithm help our community grow and then subscribe to the channel and then i'll see the guys Amphi live on the live stream Monday morning as usual okay take care guys and enjoy the new year celebrations tonight