 Hello and welcome to CMC Markets on Friday the 20th of July and this quick look at the week ahead beginning the 23rd of July and as we look back at the last few days and the fact that European markets managed to hit one month highs, concerns about trade haven't really gone away despite all the distractions of President Trump's meeting with President Putin in Russia. The Pound has had a terrible week by all accounts largely as a result of the political shenanigans in Westminster and the disarray within the Conservative Party with respect to a common Brexit position. Unfortunately divisions within the Labour Party aren't any better and as such I think there is growing concern that we could be leading up to certainly more sterling weakness as the politicians in Westminster struggle to come up with a common position on Brexit between now and October. It's been a fairly decent week for the US dollar, President Trump's comments notwithstanding about the wisdom of the Federal Reserve pushing rates up, I think what the President doesn't really understand is the fact that while the US economy is doing very well as a result of his tax cuts of January, countries like China are actively weakening their currency and in the context of the trade war and the trade discussions that is largely, that is likely to be a defence mechanism to the prospect of further tariffs further down the line. Now on the subject of trade as we look forward to next week we have the G20 meeting, the Finance Minister's meeting in Buenos Aires over the weekend where US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin is likely to be given a fairly hard time by his peers in Europe and China and pretty much around the world. The European Union has already threatened to lay out a whole host of other goods and services to put tariffs on if the President of the United States follows through on his threats to impose tariffs on European cars and in that context I think next week's meeting or the coming week's meeting between President Yonka of the President Yonka's meeting with President Trump in the White House on the 25th of July is likely to be fairly interesting given the fact that President Trump doesn't drink and President Yonka appears to like a tipple or two. So the discussions around trade should be fairly interesting. In that context we've also got the latest European Central Bank rate meeting coming up on the 26th of July. Now we're not expecting anything from that particular meeting, the ECB has already laid out its plans for tapering its asset purchase programme by the end of the year but there do appear to be significant divisions on the governing council of the potential timing of the first rate rise. Pretty much a year from now or over a year from now there's an awful lot of disagreement as to whether or not it's going to come at the end of Q3 or the beginning of Q4 or at the end of Q4. So I think clues as to whether or not differences of opinion over the timing of a rate rise from the ECB have been resolved. I think the big question is whether or not President Draghi will actually oversee the first rate rise from the ECB under his presidency as his term runs out in October next year. Now this German DAX chart is particularly interesting I think because while we hit one month highs earlier this week we weren't able to get above the 200 day moving average and what's particularly interesting about this chart is the fact that where the market stopped in the middle of this week was not only the 200 day moving average but if we take this move from the highs here to the lows here this level here at 12,785 is also a 61.8 Fibonacci retracement of the entire down move from these lows from these highs to these lows. So that particular level is a very key resistance level and I'll be paying a particular attention to that in the event that the Euro weakens further because we've seen the Euro make a brand new, we've seen the Euro break below 116 for the first time since the middle of June. It turned out to be very very short lived and we do appear to be trading in a rather wedge like formation at the moment with resistance just above the 117 area and solid support around about the 115 area. So I'll be keeping a particularly close eye on that and any significant drivers as to whether or not we'll get further Euro weakness and further dollar strength. Now President Trump has been particularly vocal in the last 24 hours about the Federal Reserve and their outlook for the US economy and the likelihood that they're going to raise rates on another two occasions this year, once in September, once in December. This week or next week's data is likely to have a key bearing on whether the dollar makes fresh one year highs on the dollar index this coming week or whether it doesn't. We do have a couple of items out next week in addition to the ECB meeting and obviously the Trump-Yonkar meeting in the middle of the week. We have Germany and France flash PMIs for manufacturing and services. Now if we see further weakness in the PMIs out of France and Germany that could actually put extra pressure on the Euro. I'm not expecting to see that particularly in France. I'm going to be looking for a bit of an uptick in French flash PMIs particularly in services because of the fact that France won the World Cup. So I think that's likely to give a significant boost to the French economy in the month of July. Positive World Cup probably going to make people feel good about the economy and go out and spend money. Flip side of that US second quarter GDP that's due out on Friday. Now that is likely to come in anywhere near 4% and if it does so then once again that's going to be significantly positive for the US dollar. It's going to exert upward pressure on the US dollar and potentially send it back towards that 115 area that I talked about in this chart on the screen right now. So those are the key economic indicators going to be keeping an eye out for in the coming few days. There are also a host of important earnings announcements. We've got the latest numbers from Sky. That'll be particularly interesting in the light of the Comcast pulling out of purchasing Fox's assets. Will Sky now become the sole attention of a tug of war between Comcast and Disney? We also have Facebook's latest quarterly earnings in the light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Will we get a delayed effect from the privacy scandal? It certainly didn't appear to manifest itself in its first quarter update where the company posted record revenues of $12 billion. And we also have Q2 earnings for Amazon. How much did the technical problems that Amazon encountered on its prime day actually filter through into its bottom line numbers? If Amazon is to be believed it had a record day for its prime day. And the likelihood is once again that we could well see a decent number here. So that's it for this week. Thank you very much for listening. Michael Houston talking to you from CMC Markets.