 Okay, very good morning to you. It is Wednesday, 24th of March. Hope you're doing well. And yeah, quite a lently breathing for me to go through both from a fundamental and a technical perspective. So I'll try to keep it as on point as possible. Don't forget as well, if you are not already subscribed to the YouTube channel and you're watching this there, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. That'd be really appreciated. But going straight into things then, it definitely is the kind of return of COVID that had dominated market themes from yesterday and has kind of spilled over into today. That layered in with the ongoing vaccine situation with some emphasis on AstraZeneca and then with some important flash PMI data coming out this morning. Quite a busy session and probably in store for today. But as we've been commenting on the briefings over the last kind of week or two, we have been tracking the emergence of COVID-19 cases that have been happening, particularly in mainland Europe. Firstly, at the likes of France and Italy, but now seeing that slightly more widespread and ultimately that leading down to further extension of lockdowns in likes of those aforementioned countries and including the likes of Netherlands as well now yesterday and obviously Germany as well over that Easter period. We even had England's chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, where UK COVID cases at the moment by comparative terms have been still in a better position, much lower. He did warn on the anniversary of the first lockdown yesterday that they will definitely be quote, definitely another surge in infections going forward in the period ahead. And of course this coming as I would say general, as you've probably witnessed, if you're based in the UK adherence to the lockdown rules continues to be somewhat questionable by just generally the broader public, whether that's somewhat complacency because of the vaccines distribution that's been going out and almost half of the adult population now being inoculated or whether it's just fatigued for the lockdown rules with the end in sight June 21st. But certainly I think the UK is certainly at risk in numbers I would anticipate to start going up in the period ahead. And obviously the risk then being about then a more globalized issue and that definitely is what the markets were reflecting yesterday. So we had a lower close on Wall Street, the S&P down, three quarters of 1%, the Dow down about a percent. Then that's that 100 slightly better as we saw a general reversal if you like back into some of those pandemic plays out of the more kind of cyclical and value shares that had been dominating the kind of reopening trade. So it's almost a reversal of that as you would anticipate an index of airline shares fell the most since October of last year, oil prices also backed off yesterday, albeit found a bit of a flaw. But if you consider the move that we had post the Fed and some of the dollar and recent strength, then oil was down a good kind of $7 an hour from where we were trading there. We're trading a 58 hand or at the moment. That didn't mean then that yields continue to move lower. And that does, you know, the market focus, I think has definitely shifted now. And yesterday was a clear reflection of that in the sense that the market's been very yield sensitive to yields moving higher. And a lot of that's been based on the notion of the reopening trade. And that generally has been based on a controlled COVID situation. But as we've seen, not just mainland Europe and the threat of rising cases in the UK, but the US last week saw a 5% increase nationwide and that being the first increase in nine weeks. So this is a global COVID potential wave that the market has to contend with now. And so yields have continued to move lower. And I'd say we've gone back to a focus on those COVID case numbers again. That narrative had kind of moved on over the last probably eight weeks or so as people were just more looking at the big pop in economic data that we're seeing to the upside in this positivity and then the yield increase. But I would say probably that's gonna pivot now as I said to COVID cases and that situation. And that is also compounded by the issues being confronted at the moment, of course, by ongoing vaccine wars, manufacturing supply constraints and so on and so forth, which we'll talk about in a moment. But looking at the 10 year here then, we did break above yesterday morning, quite key technical level. This is that kind of orange rectangle, which had been a key area of support and resistance to the price in the US 10 year. We broke through that, came back down for a perfect kind of classic test before then the quite a directional move higher throughout the entirety of the US session. All the way up and the R1 tested in the overnight Asia pack session is also the high that we saw in the initial volatility post of Fed going back to the middle of the prior week. And so quite a key technical test here to the tick in fact at 1.3209 before we've had a bit of a pullback here as Europe has come into the market. So key area of resistance to keep an eye on throughout the day. And then further pullback here, probably be keeping an eye back on that previous area of resistance going to the US close last night. And that would be at 3203 and then the 1.32 handle on any further retracement here on that move. Continuation elsewhere though in that trend of dollar strength, the Dixie is trading up again this morning up about 1.10 to 1% but holding on to a decent move higher yesterday. I did want to look at these major currency pairs then because this is on a 30 minute and you can see the breakdown in cable that we had. We had a technical break here through the low point on the 16th that double bottom on the 19th and 22nd so Friday Monday's price activity. And that led to quite aggressive selling pressure at the open yesterday amid that resurgent dollar. And then we've kind of got good technical kind of breaches pullbacks and then further directional moves here that have been occurring. And yesterday evening we broke through the initial kind of flush low we had the European morning came back up to a similar area for again that kind of classic short strategy and then eventually further pushed down and then the same again this morning broke through the Asia pack session the previous load that has seen lately US session come back up to test it this morning and then drifted back south again with the dollar still holding firm for the time being. I think on a daily chart this is really quite meaningful for sterling and why the selling pressure has been fairly high over the course of the last 24 hours. In Monday's session we did respect the 50DMA and you can see the 50DMA in cable looking on the daily sterling futures chart here it's been really well respected going back to December on two occasions on 2020 we respected it as well on Monday but yesterday it broke through with a horizontal support area and psychologically at 138 and the price just degraded from there onward and then in the overnight session on the daily here quite a nice setup in a bearish kind of fashion because those previous highs as well that we printed back in late Jan the markets come back up to test around 137.62 before then the continuation on the move lower. So here beyond the 137 handle be looking down at those lows we print on the eighth of February and then go scaling the move back down lower to 136.33 encapsulating these highs and lows from December January price action you then got the low print that we saw momentarily on the fourth at 35.68 and then again just following the move down at these key technical obstacles not definitely not saying we're going to fall that deep today but I'd say this area here for those aforementioned reasons does put then a cap to any recovery and price and probably more bearish price action going forward given the fundamental rationale behind a lot of these moves that are occurring in these currency markets at the moment. Okay, well let's get into a couple of news stories and talk about a few other things. First off, I mean yesterday if you were talking about a reversal of the reopening trade nothing more apparent then and looking at some of the more smaller kind of domestic related US stocks and again value and cyclicals really struggling and that very evident here in the Russell 2000 where the Russell 2000 has actually outperformed I think if you were looking on that anniversary of the initial stock market low in US equities for March 23rd to where we are the likes of the S&P's rallied about 80, 84% but the Russell's been up more like 140, 150% so definitely over the beginning in the year to date price activity over the last three months or so the Russell was outperformed on the reopening trade so subject to a more deeper correction given the COVID concerns emanating yesterday. So the Russell was actually down about 3.6% and remember those other major three US indices were down around a half to 1% in comparative terms. Overnight in Asia we had a pretty similar continuation stocks roughly falling the most in around two weeks in fact Hong Kong was actually one of the biggest casualties they were down about 2.4% or that came amid ongoing US-China tensions which we're gonna touch upon with North Korea in a moment but also BioNTech vaccination suspension has been seen in Hong Kong Macau overnight due to a defective viral cap in the delivery consignment that they've experienced. So Hong Kong was down quite deep and Nikkei was also suffering as well with some of the yin, just general broader currency inflows that are weighing on some of the export names. But having a look then at a few news stories can you all have to excuse my voice? If I'm sounding a little bit Barry White I do sound, I do feel fine. It's just a bit of a cough. It's non-COVID, I'm hoping so. Vaccine wars is another key thing here to be aware of and a couple of things I wanna touch upon. I wanna talk about the EU and its confrontation about enacting potential legal changes in regards to the expectation of vaccines and ingredients and then I wanna talk a little bit about, excuse me, I shoot this stuff live so there's no chance of me hitting the re-record button. Should be fine now. So again, gonna have a look at a couple of things here. So from a vaccine point of view we're gonna talk about the potential broad changes that Europe could do in this particular confrontation with the UK. Separately we're gonna talk about AstraZeneca and what happened there yesterday and what it means going forward. So first off then, the European Commission today will extend EU powers to potentially block COVID-19 vaccine exports to Britain and other areas with much higher vaccination rates to cover instances of companies back-loading contracted supplies according to EU officials. One of the kind of devil in the details of what I was reading last night though was that with no numerical targets the change is unlikely to trigger mass export bands of EU made vaccines. And for me, reading between the lines then this is the next kind of evolution of the EU legally turning the screw, if you like on some of the confrontation particularly the lights in the UK to show look, we are serious with this and we can invoke these changes which is going to cause difficulties all round. What we're asking for here is a kind of relationship that would benefit both. And so the movement of then ingredients to make and construct these vaccines to be an open door kind of policy and so on. So for me, I don't actually think and I hope we don't get to the point of outright exportation bands on vaccines. I don't think any politician really wants that and particularly when you think about the underlying COVID situation in Europe in itself I don't think they can really afford to go down that route. Don't forget beyond the ideology of inoculating the Euro area a lot of these individual politicians are under increasing pressure particularly in the lights of France and Emmanuel Macron with the looming kind of French elections just over a year away. And likewise with the incumbents for many of these European nations their handling of the COVID strategy and deployment of vaccinations is going to be this singular biggest kind of factor that will determine their longevity as a politician. So I can't really see them as much as there's this kind of national situation of this view about astral, the drug I think at the end of the day loss of life, prolonged nature of then lockdown and again the impact that has economically then on individuals and their families I think they can't afford to run that risk. So I think this is again it's a lot of posturing and positioning in that respect. Furthermore separately in a different article the EU is also only prepared to let the UK take a small portion of output from a new astral facility due to come on stream in the next few weeks. The EU is insisting that it should get the lion's share because it has a far bigger population and because it's vaccination program is running behind us. So their rationale definitely based on the fact that look countries like the UK are so far ahead of where they're at that they deserve then the right to be able to put forward in the queue in order to catch up in that respect. So that's on the vaccine side. On the other side is this emerging kind of crisis for AstraZeneca at the moment and AstraZeneca has been kind of the real key out performer and for the UK this has been the reason why we've been able to kind of really roll out this program of vaccinations in a really fast and effective format. And any issues that pertaining to AstraZeneca would be particularly troubling on a worldwide scale given the cost basis as well of AstraZeneca has been much more favorable on a global level particularly those outside of the developed kind of world economy. So particularly important for those coming from the emerging markets kind of space. But what's happened here is the company AstraZeneca have said they'll release up to date results from a final stage trial of its vaccine within the next 48 hours. And this has come about because of essentially a dispute with independent scientists overseeing a US trial. Now what these US trial scientists were trying to do was help the situation for AstraZeneca by unveiling latest results in order to counteract some of the question marks that have arisen because of blood clots from that Ouija medical council and that Europe have been saying that momentarily resulted in the suspension of the Astra drug that we saw last week. Now US were trying to help here and what they've actually uncovered is something a little bit more disturbing about AstraZeneca and their kind of usage of data and how they've been presenting their facts. And essentially what's happened is it's come as AstraZeneca submitted up to February 17th data that showed vaccine was 79% effective at stopping symptomatic COVID-19 but broader analysis including up to date results show a lower efficacy rate of around 69 to 74%. And generally what this has led to then is Astra shares were down close to 2% yesterday. They did underperform the broader market. Investors who do not stand to profit from the vaccine during the pandemic fretted that the company's broader reputation couldn't be hurt by handling this situation because this isn't the first incident that Astra has confronted with the way which they've reported their results from their trials and their data. So definitely quite a lot going on here and all obviously almost capitulating at the same time whether it's underlying real COVID cases on the increase whether it's manufacturing supply constraints and distribution issues or whether it's underlying belief in confidence which is integral then to the success of vaccinations is people actually wanting to take them which we're already seeing according to a YouGov poll that I issued on Monday and on that fact, let's just be really thorough with this and cover off that and give it some clarity of why I'm saying this is, here it is, this is what Europeans now see as AstraZeneca's vaccine as unsafe. Now this is one of the things that's been promoted by Eurozone officials by suspending their drugs on that blood clot which ultimately seems like a bit of a red herring the European medical agency the year may have come out and said, look, the benefits, the rate of risks and actually proportionate then if you're looking at actual numbers compared to the amount vaccinated it's incredibly small amount. Nonetheless, the confidence in our drug has already decreased substantially and now we start to see questionable kind of ethics around the usage of their data in regards to then the efficacy rate of the drug. This is problematic overall for the rollout of successful vaccinations and as you can see here, Britain still remains much higher than anywhere else where mainland Europe but you can see here of the three main drugs AstraZeneca, the confidence within it has dropped spectacularly across mainland Europe over the course of the last few weeks. So really definitely quite problematic then for the timings of the reopening obviously in the post COVID environment. All right, I want to get up speed of a few other things because there's definitely other things on the agenda. This was one thing that was reported last night and I did tweet about this so you can follow me on Twitter here if you are on that platform but just to recap, basically last night it was reported that North Korea test fired two short range missiles over the weekend according to US officials last night in what one expert suggested was effectively a mild move by Pyongyang lobbying for a relaxation of sanctions over its nuclear missile programs. Almost feels reminiscent of where we were really in the earlier part of the Trump kind of tendency in the White House where I think very much a tactical way of negotiating between the US and China is this kind of proxy use of North Korea as a weapon that the Chinese really ultimately have probably the most control geopolitically to really keep peace on the Korean Peninsula. Given their geographic ties to that particular land and the amount of trade that the two nations do with one another, it's very little the US can really do in that region without flaring up tensions with China when talking of North Korea specifically not forgetting as well that the US has sensitive relationships in that region with Japan, South Korea and so on to maintain with them strategic maritime routes going through the contested kind of South China Sea East China Sea and so on. So main point here is that this type of headline sounds pretty sensational if not used to looking at markets so we're not aware of the kind of politics in that region but it is quite common behavior and particularly comes, it's no coincidence I feel that given the sour start to the first top level tier talks that we saw in Alaska just around a week and a half ago between the US and China and the first being with the Biden administration I think it comes as absolutely no surprise to see North Korea kind of warming up the missile capability just to put a little bit more pressure on the US as they kind of position for leverage as these two superpowers go into the negotiating table at the moment. So that's all I'll say on the issue at the moment I don't think this is cause for concern as strange as that might sound given actually what is happening here and what North Korea are doing for the market short term it's definitely a COVID issue not a North Korea China issue China will become an issue in my mind post the kind of actual point where with COVID the large majority of the globe have been inoculated with an effective vaccine and at that point then the narrative will shift and no longer will we be so focused as the top dominant macro theme on COVID and I'm talking here probably 9, 12, 18 months down the line China will be a really big thing again just not right now so I expect this type of activity to probably simmer on a seemingly somewhat alarming headline rate probably going forward. A look ahead to what's coming we have had the UK CPI come out already and in fact the year in year came in at four well 0.4% a little bit weaker the core reading though came in at 0.9% against expectations of 1.4 so quite soft actually from the UK inflation data and I wasn't really anticipating a kind of upside move and more looking for that to come in the future but obviously everyone's been quite obsessive about rising inflation expectations and higher yields and that has failed to materialize in this data in fact it's a lot softer than expected and so already in the face of a resurgent dollar it just acts as more catalyst to fuel the flames for the directional sell-off that we're seeing in these dollar-based currency pairs so you can see here just helping add more firepower to the downward move and we've broken through the S1 here in the cable future and through the initial low we had in the H-pad session to bust that 138 handle so back on those dailies again we're coming up to our next strategic support area and around 3681 seemingly or similarly the euro also under pressure through this dollar move and I'll put the chart here just briefly this is the low that we had back on the ninth and you can see that was providing a support area here through the morning's trade but that kind of sterling weakness just triggering another round of dollar movement and then subsequently euro also under pressure again and on a daily chart for the euro it's again getting quite interesting as well from a major pair perspective because we've got those lows that we were seeing on the bounce back on eighth ninth of March coming into play and any further breakdown of that again would be looking for a move deeper down to around the 118 handle which was that low we printed going back to really kind of mid to late November time so multi-month low there that would be back to the calendar though and a few other things beyond that we've got the eurozone PMIs coming out as well soon and these are going to be also very important they always are these are the flash reading is not final and will we see as well a little bit of contrast between the performance of the UK and the US for the period it reflects which is March when these were conducted because we've probably missed a little bit of this latest panic on COVID when these particular surveys were conducted and is there a contrast between kind of underperformance in Europe really with everything that's been going on which is a steady progressive uptick in COVID cases and rolled over lockdowns so generally lower there but slightly higher numbers in other regions so again remember it comes out staggered fashion France at 815, Germany at 830 and these will be important if they come out weak in the context of what's been going on this morning we could get another further push up in the dollar both pairs weighed I would be looking for that to also weigh down on the commodity space so looking for weight in precious metals in gold and silver and also probably in oil as well to give another strategic cap to price just given the fact that it's already got some question marks on the demand side with the potential new COVID wave forthcoming and then you've got the olive and trees later usual times 330 speaker wise you do have pow and yelling go at it again not expecting anything new there just given they just roll this out in front of the Senate banking committee this time what they said yesterday Christine Legarde does speak later on this afternoon but you must bear in mind it's about climate change I wouldn't anticipate any major comments there either given the close proximity to the recent ECB meeting we've had two Fed voters Williams and Daly do speak later and one of them is speaking on the central New York economy so very focused on the other ones so they're kind of mildly on topic again given what we've just had from the Fed we'll be looking for too much here but perhaps any real-time commentary on what's happening COVID-wise would be a particularly interest for the market and then you've got the five-year no auction out of the US later on this evening and again it's the seven-year tomorrow that's going to be key for sentiment for broader markets all right that is it going to leave it there let you guys get on with the days and important economic data the PMI is coming up shortly quite a busy market open quite a lot going on any questions at all feel free to drop me a comment on the video otherwise, plan for a live community I'll see you in the Discord Room thanks very much