 Hello, welcome to this week's CMC Markets Currency Snapshot with myself, Jasper Lawler. We're going to be looking at cable, that's the British pound against the US dollar at the moment. PM David Cameron is in Brussels. He's talking up a prospect of a UK deal with Europe. And since this debate has become a bit more current, a bit more topical, and since Cameron has really been trying to get this deal hammered through, the British pound has really started to suffer. And we've got that on one hand, but we also have changing ideas about how much the Federal Reserve can increase interest rates in the US. So both these two factors driving the British pound at the moment, we've got a fairly clear defined price range on the chart, which we're going to have a look at and see what the prospects are for a breakout. So first I want to show you just this slightly strange looking chart when you first look at it. It's a daily price chart, it's just comparing the British pound against the dollar index. The reason I'm doing this is that you can see, if we look at this chart now, there's a sort of gradually inclining price trend in the dollar index. This is happening throughout December and into the early part of January, basically with the idea that the Fed has just raised rates, they seem to be the only one capable of doing so and the US dollar has been going up with those prospects of higher interest rates. But if we look at the British pound, that's really crashed pretty severely. The downtrend is pretty sharp and so I think where we can conclude from this, it is not just the US dollar driving this decline throughout December, there's something else very much British related and I think there's a good chance that it's the Brexit debate weighing on the ability of the Bank of England to raise interest rates this year. Now you'll have seen on that chart that after those two areas of trend that we talked about, there's been quite a sharp drop off in the US dollar and the British pound has managed to stabilise a bit. That to my mind is more of a US dollar phenomenon because bets that the Fed are able to raise rates further this year have seriously declined. The US economy is looking a little weak and there's a lot of cause for maybe not even any more rate cut, any more rate hikes from the Fed this year, even some talk of a rate cut and the Federal Reserve themselves have actually been looking at negative interest rates as a possible policy tool. So US dollars, Paul, and off the British pound has stabilised so now we're going to have a look at the longer term chart for the British pound that a shorter term chart just to see where we are in terms of levels and where we can work out from here. So this is a monthly chart for the British pound that we're going to look at next. You can see that the 142.30 support area has really been the big one that we've reacted from here and you can see that even though we pop below it, we're back up through it now and we're sort of stabilising. Now if we drop down to this daily price chart, you can see a bit more specifically the price levels that are involved, the 143.50 has been quite the pivot level. We pushed up through there, found support, we dropped through there again. Now we're right in around that area acting as resistance. This is what's causing the price to bounce around in the time being but really for us to get some ideas to where the direction of the pound can be headed next, it's got to be a move through this 142.30 support to tell us that we're renewing the downtrend or push up through the 146.30 resistance which was the peak from January to tell us that actually this downtrend has ended and we're looking at more of a potential uptrend taking place. OK, that's it for this week's CMC Markets currency snapshot. We were looking at the pound of course against the US dollar namely. Now we've talked about this price range. Really whether the price can push up through the top or bottom of the range kind of depends on these two factors. It's do expectations remain low that the Fed is going to be able to raise rates this year? If it does that, that's a positive factor for the pound. Does David Cameron sign a pretty weak deal for Europe? Maybe even no deal at all. That's a negative impact for the pound. To my mind the two are kind of offsetting each other at the moment. There's uncertainty of a Bank of England rate rise. There's also uncertainty about a US rate rise. And so that sort of combined uncertainty probably means we're going to be in and around this kind of price range for a while probably without much of a breakout in either direction. We're probably looking at range trading which means high probability trades at the bottom of the range, high probability trades at the top of the range.