 Good morning to CMC Espresso. US markets behave as one could expect given their seasonality and cyclicality they're going down. Sell in May and go away. You already know this stock market adage. According to the seasonality investors should come back in September, but this year it could be different and you could find yourself being too late because there is a dominant cycle persistent and that is the presidential election cycle because in the US this year a new president will be elected and so this stock market year could be a very special one. Typically in an election year US stocks fall in May and they form a low in the middle or towards the end of May and then they rise and indeed do so for the rest of the year including new annual highs. The US reporting season is on its last legs. 87% of the companies in the S&P 500 index have presented quarterly earnings numbers thanks to low expectations index in advance of the start of the season 71% of companies exceeded their earnings estimates 48% shown both in profit and revenue. Fewer companies downgraded their earnings forecast than in the last quarter but this could also be a result of lower expectations. But these are just nuances. It is clear that earnings ranked 7.5% and sales declined by 1.5% year on year and that is already the fifth consecutive quarter of earnings declines. Ultimately, this is not surprising. 60% of listed non-financial companies in the US have repurchased their own shares since the year 2010 in 2014 the volume of those buybacks exceeded the total net profit and in the third quarter of 2015 as much as the entire free cash flow of US companies was used to buy back their own shares. What is happening here is companies is that we see companies that pay out money to shareholders rather than invest in their long-term growth potential which is going down. The reasons for this are diverse, some see no future some don't have the courage to invest in new products in the global market and some of the boards have also pegged their salaries and bonuses to earnings per share and share price performance. But after all companies buy shares investors no longer do that. For several weeks now investors pick up investment-crate bonds and sell high yield bonds and they are also on the sell side on the stock market. In European equities we're seeing the longest selling series of shares since eight years and in Japan it is the longest selling spree since the beginning of the year 2012. The beneficiary of all of this besides investment-crate bonds is gold. In 16 of the past 17 weeks it experienced money inflows when you look at the physical backed ETFs that are listed on global exchanges. Goldman Sachs does no longer see a rate hike in June as probable nor do the markets after the weak labor market data for April. Stan Trockenmiller, the billionaire investor and former colleague of George Soros, said last week that he sees gold as a currency and that gold is right now his largest forex position. In fact, if gold were to rise above 1,307 US dollars, this could be an interruption of the technical market downtrend that has been persistent since the year 2011 and the next step would be done in the bottoming process of the yellow metal.