 Okay, very good morning Wednesday 29th of April. I hope you're doing well. Just a quick final reminder later on this evening. I will be covering the FMC in full live via a webinar on Zoom. You are welcome to register. Whether you're a trader or a student, you can join us. All we need to do is go on the link I'm going to post in the video description. I think there's about 100 spaces left. So look forward to talking to you guys later on. Will's also going to join us as well as peers and the others. We're going to have a bit of a chat about some tips about managing your kind of trading mindset as well. So a couple of topics around psychology will also be covered. So I'm looking forward to that session. But looking at the day ahead and what have we got on the agenda? So this morning, quite interesting actually. I was watching the news when it came out last night for Alphabet quite keen to see their earnings results. Initially in the aftermarket trade, they were up about 4%. It actually went as high as 9% in extended hours trade. And that pretty much arrested what was at lower close on Wall Street led by the NASDAQ. I think the other indices were down. The losses were more marginal, kind of around the half percent region. But the NASDAQ was underperforming. You can see pretty big selloff that we had pretty much through the initiation of the open and then went all the way back down to around 86.50, which respectively was around close to its S2 on the daily pivots. But you can see a gap up here. And then we've pushed up higher during the Asia Pacific session. So Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, all their local stock indices rose. Equities in South Korea also were higher despite a warning from Samsung electronics that their profit may fall in the second quarter as the pandemic is obviously hitting demand at the moment. But otherwise, it was a much needed event to offset some of the selling pressure that was being observed yesterday. But this morning, just coming under a little bit of pressure once again, reversing perhaps some of that move, there has been quite a busy earnings day in general, not only is there a few things to look out for from the US in pre and aftermarket. We've had, I can just see AstraZeneca being out this morning. Their core EPS are touched above expectations at 105. Revenue is also actually a beat. Their final 2020 guidance remains unchanged. I know that Deutsche has been out. There's a few other names as well. So do make sure then the head of the cash open in about half an hour's time that you've had a good read through if you're trading any of those indices. But in other markets, T-notes, a little bit of an uptick amid just some of this latest, just fade if you like of the games that were seen overnight in the equity space. So the US 10 year bottom right here, just coming close proximity to the late US session highs that we printed yesterday at 139.03 and a half. So just keeping an eye on that some near term resistance for this morning. Gold pretty unreactive to all of this at the moment so far this morning. Trading just above its pivot at 1724 in the futures and oil having dipped considerably yesterday finding a bit of a flaw around the psychological $10 handle. Just given again the kind of liquidation of the USO into further out duration kind of contracts in the calendar months looking to offset any repeat of what we had last week with that kind of negative oil price situation with that front month futures contract. And so prices have bounced a decent amount. We're up about just over $3 from those lows and probably now that a lot of that has happened to a certain degree. They've spread that across several months now probably the likelihood lessens a little bit that we're going to get this massive run on markets. Can't imagine there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be want to touching that June contract in particular but obviously it does remain susceptible on the downside to potentially quite violent movements as people kind of liquidate the positions in that specific contract roll over to say July and so on. But for the moment fairly stable finding a bit of a platform at a level you can see here down the bottom chart of what was providing some resistance yesterday evening and also during the Monday evening and also yesterday in the afternoon session. And that was also an error support as well on the 23rd in that June contract. So just sitting around that technical point at the moment. There were the API numbers they were out last night. While I'm on the subject what did they look like? Well we had a crude build of 9.978 million slightly smaller actually than what markets were anticipating. We've obviously seen some huge consecutive builds. This is the 14th in fact weekly crude build and the gasoline surprise though with the drawdown after four weeks of build. So that gasoline number in fact just just going against the recent trend but the crude headline markets you can see not really that reactive to it. I don't think that's particularly a surprise as I've said it's been multiple weeks in a row now we've been seeing these particularly large builds just given the pandemic situation that's ongoing at the moment hampering demand and therefore still a somewhat oversupplied situation until those cuts really start to take hold from OPEC plus over the coming weeks. Back to the charts momentarily elsewhere in the FX markets not really too much going on right now. Dolan just coming back a little bit from having declined overnight the Asian session. The Dixie narrowing its loss is to just one tenth of a percent. So you're a dollar top left and cable beside it just sitting above the pivot at the moment. The pivot probably being a fairly decent level in both pairs for the time being just having a look here you can see if I just quickly highlight it this area of highs that we were trading back on on Monday's session we had a retest of that same area yesterday evening and that's where that pivot resides at the moments and then in Euro dollar you've got the overnight Asia Pacific kind of low here so we'll just make this a bit bigger. You've got those other highs as well that we've seen from yesterday evening and then going back as well to some of those other areas here and here of interest around that similar price point which again would coincide around the pivot level. Now the one thing to be aware of I guess going into today's session is we now start heading into what is the fairly busy part of the calendar we've got the Fed obviously happening later on this evening we've got the ECB tomorrow you've got lots of earnings coming out you've got some people like Boeing coming out later I think you've got Microsoft aftermarket today you've got Apple, Amazon you know some of the world's biggest companies reporting over the next two days so there's quite a lot here that could act as potential I guess catalysts to then inspire the next kind of more directional move in markets so at the moment I'm kind of going into this morning I guess fairly neutral in a sense I mean with the S&P 500 I was just looking this morning there's a fairly nice level of support more broadly speaking this is just what I wanted to do here was encapsulate this rectangle here which was the S&P coming under pressure via the kind of drag that the oil price shock was creating at the beginning of last week and as we were discussing in the briefing yesterday that kind of time has passed now and equities largely have been ignoring a lot of that negative price movement yesterday we saw a breakout of kind of the the range of what we had been trading over the course of the last kind of two weeks quite a powerful initial move on the upside you can see however then as soon as the the market opened on wall street we came crashing back down again only then to reverse but there's a couple of nice nice points I guess of support that just going to zoom this in a touch here so the pivot level again just kind of like with those currencies here looks quite nice just from the Monday high top and going back on to the 20th as well so it's probably going to be a decent level now certainly until we hear a bit more from these earnings reports they're going to be coming out later and then the open on wall street as well just having a look see what this trend line potential a couple of touches there and that would coincide where depending on what the time frames are with around some of those highs that we're seeing in the overnight late age-specific session early European entrance that comes in around that 2900 level which is also around that R1 and depending on where that would come in with that trend line that'd be worth just keeping an eye on if we come back up to that level later on as part of the session as it develops any break below pivot then on the move to the downside you've got the kind of the weekly low if you like down at this level which I'd probably be keeping an eye on if we were to trade a little bit more heavy around 28 53 so some nice the S&P has been I know Sam's been commenting with it to a couple of the guys quite nice technically over the last week or so been forming these nice kind of periods of consolidation break in either direction but typically from the back end of last week breaking higher and then forming in this a kind of nice structure to then push ahead again on a break and a classic to get back in and long on the pullback so be similar similar kind of techniques we'll be using as we go in the period ahead but as I said going forward what will the market have much appetite not sure obviously there's quite a few things to fed although I'm not really expecting a great deal out of them they haven't really provided any way in the form of real clear guidance since their last meeting post the pandemic and lockdown and so that's going to be probably the most interesting point rather than any new policy shifts in that sense because we've already seen them do so much already all right a quick run through some of the headlines alphabet as I mentioned pretty pretty decent up the executive comment showed the company's cloud and YouTube businesses kept growing despite the COVID-19 pandemic sales were 33.71 billion up 14 percent from a year ago above street estimates YouTube revenues jumped 33.5 percent their Google cloud top line saw 52 percent and their shares were up 9 percent in aftermarket trade the company's search and display ad revenues though had dropped 10 percent in March a lot of that coming amid the kind of the associated lockdowns a lot of businesses having to tighten their belts so decreasing their marketing budgets and that that hurting that side of the business but overall fairly positive and executives are optimistic on usage trends and long term prospects elsewhere the other thing that I just saw in Bloomberg that I thought I might point out because often you hear people referring to the VIX and they were suggesting that the fear gaged basically is closed below its second month's future and I'll explain what that means in a moment but in summary it means that the S&P 500 volatility measure a bullish sign over the next month and what this looks like is is this so essentially the VIX closed below its second month future on Monday for the first time since February if you look back to where we were here on the 21st of Feb and this this would reflect going back to a more normal structure so contracts dated further out tend to carry more uncertainty than those closer in so what you should see then is that normal kind of trajectory of a curve and its regular kind of shape seeing that the further you go out in the future the more uncertainty that there is about what might happen and so therefore we're seeing a bit of a reversal that would be a signal that actually this pattern would suggest that potentially people are foreseeing a period of calm in a period ahead whether or not that materializes or not obviously a lot of the things that we've been talking about what could create the next spark of potential violent price movement I think probably the main risk to that is going to be the potential for a second wave on the back of the relaxation of lockdown measures globally but the reality of that is probably a couple of weeks away from that even being known because if you think about it not only are we looking at more like mid to late May for most countries lockdowns really to be loosened more significantly but then there's that incubation period which can be up to two weeks before people even start to so show signs that they've contracted this virus so probably makes sense that why this is reflecting in that way but a couple people looking at this is then if you're following that trend in the equity market despite the little sell-off that we had yesterday then we could be on for a continuation of that move and just looking at the S&P on a slightly longer time frame if we were looking at the daily this is kind of that fixed chart I've had for a while and we've managed to get above quite a key area of resistance around that 2855 which was the October low and it was also an area which the market found some resistance back in the the mid part of April so about two weeks ago but we've managed to push back above that we've now got the 618 fib from the all-time high to the March 23rd low coming in not too far above the current price is probably the next target to look out for and then above there around 2949 50 which would be those peaks that you can see there that we've printed which were previous all-time highs of course back in October of 2018 and then April of 2019 as well and you can see the peaks are some of the the other price action through the period of 19 so probably up around here will be the next interesting test if we continue to move higher you've then got the 200 DMA coming in which would kind of run into around 3000 level if you're looking at the S&P in the futures okay other things to be aware of we've had some Australian data come out overnight and Aussie touch firmer nothing spectacular but is trading above its R1 and at the moment up about 37 pips the Australian CPI it makes for quite sensational reading but I would say it's probably more of a temporary lift rather than anything sustainable so food underpins stronger inflation essentially so if you think about it they've had wildfire about bushfires that's caused immense damage and so you know the available number of goods to eat in terms of fruit and veg and so on would have been diminished and therefore prices were higher already now you've had the coronavirus shut down impacting food prices given the kind of infantry building and things that people were doing kind of stockpiling and so on so CPI rise the fastest pace since 2014 yes that's the first time the headline figure back inside the RBA target since 2018 but I don't think I wouldn't really read too much into that because ultimately beyond that those those effects generally speaking the Australian economy like everyone else in the globe is going to slow considerably under the pressure of the reality of the the pandemic and people's lots of jobs lots of income lots of confidence and so naturally inflation will decline under those types of circumstances particularly in the context of more loosening of monetary policy from the RBA another headline as well you had a surprise announcement from Fitch they downgraded Italy's rating by one notch to triple B minus that's just one level above junk for Italy they weren't actually scheduled to hold their next meeting in july 10th when they had a review date Moody's is due next month but they came out they made this out of cycle downgrade anyway and quite a few people I saw on Twitter were talking about this because it was an unexpected announcement but the one thing I want to remind you is remember the ECB has already kind of made that move in buying sovereign incorporate what they call fallen angels which means that a credit rating that drops as far as a certain level below investment grade would be aimed or they can basically still be eligible for collateral with the central banks so yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't read too much into this to be honest and it is still in investment grade the the point is it's just one notch away from being junk which obviously would be quite symbolic in nature but the overall changes and shifts are already being made by the central banks and and namely the ECB and perhaps this could be something we'll be looking out for in the press conference for sure in terms of questions that will be put to Christine Lagarde interested to see what she has to say when that happens as far as the Fed is concerned for tonight as I said the registration link for our for our zoom session is in the video so so do sign up for that I'm not going to go into this in any great detail right now all I'm going to say is really we're looking out mainly for forward guidance as I said earlier they've kind of deployed a lot of their weapons or bullets at this point and what we're more concerned about now is there how do they currently see current conditions and what's their future expectation the current guidance as it stands officially from the Fed was issued before the mass layoffs begun and obviously we've got jobless claims coming tomorrow I think I caught a headline we're going to probably see another three four million type number and obviously this is getting into the idea then that we can we could see layoffs in the month of April alone when we get to round to non-farm payrolls next Friday which could be around the 25 million market so you know it's this type of thing well you know what are the Fed not just saying about that situation but what do they see for the period ahead for the second half of the year would be particularly interesting to see what options how confident they are and what options do they have on the table if things were to take another sudden turn for the worse if we were to see quite a large second wave on the relaxation of these these lockdown measures that's the type of thing in summary I'm looking at from a Canada point of view we have got on the docket here the German state CPI as they typically start coming out at eight o'clock so we'll get Saxony followed by Brandenburg, Battenvertenburg and so on then at 10 o'clock you've got the various sentiment indicators coming out of Europe economic industrial services I know these are highlighted on the calendar but they don't really move the market so I kind of discount those I wouldn't really factor them too much into your your strategies for this morning and then going into the afternoon of course we get the Q1 advanced US GDP now a little bit up for debate about how important is this going to be one of the things here I don't know if you can quite see it but I'll read it out the expectation is for a minus four percent reading so this is GDP in the US their their gross rate over the period of the last 12 readings as you can see we've kind of hovered around two percent and in fact Trump you could say have done a pretty good job at keeping this number fairly consistent I mean there were periods where you know we were we saw the inversion of the yield curve and we thought the trade war wasn't going to play out there were fears that this was going to get quite low several months ago but it somewhat stabilized until obviously the pandemic is here and what we're expecting today is a median consensus of minus four percent now minus four percent I'm going to have to put this onto a 25-year chart of US GDP to capture them the global financial crisis so you can see here during the severity of that fallout the GDP level got down to around the minus eight minus nine percent type level and today a minus four percent would be here however the bottom end of the range if you look on the calendar is minus 15 percent to a high most optimistic a plus one percent so minus 15 percent would be by far the worst there on record so why is there you know when you're looking at these distribution of these estimates from these banks obviously the models that they run to try and generate these economic predictions amount this type of data now given the fact that we capture the last two weeks of March within this first quarter reading it's incredibly difficult then to get a degree of real concrete evidence or calculation into that model and hence the variance is very wide because the the lockdown would have been hard to just get good quality information given the time frame so here what I'd say is yes it's expected at minus four percent could it come in much lower than that sure it could so the point is there is how important is that beyond the initial knee jerk reaction I'm not so sure because ultimately don't forget people are more obsessed about q2 not q1 q2 is what's going to be the shocker when GDP is going to you know put put whatever today's number comes out as well in the shadows because that's going to really capture the severity of the total national lockdown in America and this mass layoff situation that we've seen unfold in the jobless numbers so yeah I definitely would be would be out of any positions definitely would be listening out for that figure we're more than likely going to see a initial knee jerk reaction to it but don't forget as well the traders will be mindful that you got the Fed later so if there is any trade opportunities they could well be fairly short lived as people will be wanting to just clear the deck just in case we do hear of any surprises no point going in in any position of risk into the Fed as much as we're kind of suggesting that it could be a fairly tame event with all things being equal from an earnings perspective this is a bit small for the amplify guys I've sent this out to all of you this morning so you'll have to full list and you can see all the corresponding numbers what you're looking out for the pre-market names I'm particularly interested in going in chronological order general electric will be around 1130 London time I'm also keeping a close eye on Boeing Boeing actually you know was one of the biggest companies in the Dow not that long ago it's now the 10th largest company in the Dow so yeah quite a radical shift obviously for that firm their market caps only actually around 78 billion now so way smaller than what it was only around two years ago to put it in context I think Netflix is now got a market cap of more than double that size nearly triple so yeah what a world we live in aftermarket of course as I mentioned there's quite a few other key names to look out for namely Microsoft and Facebook they're probably the biggest names to be aware of but you also have the likes of Qualcomm as well as eBay and Tesla there's another interesting name that's going to be reporting as well in aftermarket trade so remember just follow me on Twitter I'll be tweeting some of those results as they come out later on this evening for those interested all right that is it I wish you a good day don't forget to register for the event and hopefully I'll speak to you later on this evening all right have a great day ahead thanks very much