 Okay, very good morning. It is Friday 29th of January. Hope you're doing well. Thought I would start off with this fairly comical situation with this tweet from Robin Hood. Not the Robin Hood, the actual Robin Hood, and I had to give this a shout out. This is the actual home of the worldwide Robin Hood Society, of course, based in Sherwood, Nottingham in England, and they tweeted last night. Lovely to have all these new followers. Can we just check that you're actually wanting to follow the Robin Hood Society and Nottinghamshire? Not the Robin Hood app, either way. Big welcome from Sherwood, and yeah, I mean, how many followers have they got now? They've gone up to 33,000. Don't know what they were before, but absolute crazy, crazy, crazy town, but look, let's move on, and as much as we're going to discuss an update on Wall Street bets and so on, because it is definitely being a factor for markets for sure this week, let's just have a quick look at what's been going on. So we had a high close on Wall Street last night. So a full, almost reversal in much of the sudden pressure that took place the day before when that initial kind of more focused concentration of liquidation perhaps led some of that selling pressure. So on Wall Street, we actually closed up about one and a half percent of the S&P. Now up a cent, and that's like up around 1.3. However, during the Asia Pacific trading hours, things have kind of soured again somewhat. And you can see here in these index futures, I mean, there's really nothing that's happened overnight, the Asia Pacific session, but we've kind of reversed that game, but back to where we were. So quite a seesaw price action seen across the board, really similar kind of price movements observed in some of the currency markets. So quite evident here in Eurodollar top left gold as well. It did ramp up at one point yesterday, but then came all the way back down by the time that Europe exited the market oil as well, seeing similar type of price movement, but pretty much a scratch from where we were just 24 hours ago. So, yeah, at the moment, I'd say the market is in a little bit of an unusual price pattern. I think fundamentally, I mean, I'm going to update you beyond Wall Street bets and things like the vaccine. There's an update on Italy. There's the earnings and data coming up. But ultimately, I think at the moment, short term intraday directional, fundamental biases are pretty limited, don't really see much in the way of the news, but also the actual cues of which market sentiment is derived from is giving much clarity at the moment. So it'd be very much more looking at the session ahead from a training of the futures market of just looking at solid technical areas of interest and generally correlated moves. And also, if you actually think, as per what is normally the case, much of today's movement is more US centric than in the UK European morning. And so I'd be looking for any kind of more directional moves to take place then, but not overthinking it really and not trying to, I guess, create any type of narrative around this movement other than it is pretty indecisive at the moment. And I guess until this storm blows over, which is Wall Street bets and this this kind of challenge from the activist retail market on these hedge funds, then the dust, I think, will settle inevitably on that and the world will move on. But at the moment, we're kind of still in the midst of it for the time being. So yeah, a couple of things to have a look at. One was I just quickly wanted to look at the NASDAQ because I saw some of the technical charts that a few of the guys were showing the Amplify Live Discord room last night. And I put the NASDAQ on a five minute. And I thought the five minute was was quite interesting because, yeah, really nice respect of a trend line in yesterday's session. And you can see here from then the acceleration and price movement that we saw going into the afternoon UK time, respected it literally to the tick in the morning when the US came in and then really getting into the crux of the US session. And then as we come back down here on the five minute chart in the overnight Asia Pacific session, where we found support exactly around that horizontal line that was again a meaningful level for this week going back to Wednesday and Thursday. So yeah, really nice technical response in some of these charts, particularly the NASDAQ, of which as well, one of the guys was also looking at the NASDAQ. I think it was here from a technical support line point of view. So if I quickly just take some of these off, I'll show you what I mean. Trend line. I think he was taking it from this low here and how well that's being respected as this NASDAQ has come off. Certainly, there's been some disruptions off these all time highs. But I guess from a daily point of view, we've had two days of trying to attempt to break that downside trend line that's been in play really since going back to the 10th of November of last year. And if you remember, this is when we were seeing some volatility around the initial this high here was the Pfizer first news and the positive vaccine that came out, which was rejected at the previous all time high. And that horizontal level, obviously, is a really strong point on any breach of this. There's obviously a few areas to have a look at before we'd ever get to that point like here at 12906, a bit lower down then just following the price movement, but a really strong area in that rectangle. But for the moment, that trend line is something I'd bear in mind if we were to see any further downside pressure because it is in fairly close proximity to current price at the moment. So if we did trade heavy later, maybe worth bearing in mind because a breach of that could just open up a bit of a deeper move if that were to materialize. But again, fundamentally, I don't have too much of a bias really. I'm coming into this just just just monitoring price action rather than any preconceived idea of how I think really today is going to play out. But look, there's a few things that I need to to talk about on this whole GameStop and Wall Street bets. Actually, Eddie's going to do another chat with me to update about some of these brokerages which has caused outrage amongst a lot of these retail traders that have been quite focused on this concentrated kind of sector of companies with high short interest. And let me just get you up to speed exactly what's been going on. I've written some notes here of a few things and a few points that I wanted to stress. And first of all, as you can see here, GameStop fell heavy yesterday, around 44 percent. And that came after Robin Hood, Interactive Brokers, some others took steps to curtail activity in a lot of these high flying stocks. So AMC, GameStop being some of the main ones. AMC were down about 57 percent yesterday. Volume also fell as a byproduct of that to give context. There was about 55 million shares traded as of the afternoon on Thursday compared to Friday's record of 197 million. As you can expect, then, the kind of self-entitled degenerates were just outraged. Twitter was just on fire, as were most social media platforms. There was lots of memes going around. I think the Robin Hood app, which had like a 4.8 rating, has gone down to one, for example, as the mob attack. But lawmakers also had a thing to say about this as well. A lot of them were talking about this idea, about how, obviously, in line with that crowd, that this is unfair, it's unjustified, you know, let's not forget Robin Hood's slogan is to democratise finance for all, which is quite the opposite if you're banning these people from now being able to participate in the market, seemingly after they've caused this type of disruption. A few other points before I get into some of the reason and rationale why they took that action. Goldman Sachs's basket of stocks favoured by hedge funds. Remember, I talked about this the day before. That actually jumped yesterday, the most since early November, having that prior day fallen by the most since September. So, yeah, continue to see some pretty seesaw movement at the moment. A couple of things, though, to be aware of here. The action taken by these guys, I don't think is that rare. I mean, this is some of the headlines here, and I'll talk you through what this actually means. So whenever there is extreme volatility, it is actually quite a normal procedure for these brokers to look to protect themselves. I remember back several years ago, when before I worked at Amplify, the company I used to work for, we used to provide a service of analysis and research, and one of our clients was a broker called Al Pari. And Al Pari was a substantially large broker at the time. And they were a fairly large client for us. They used to then use our research and pass it on to a lot of their kind of clients. But when the Swiss National Bank dropped the peg on their currency, you remember when the 120 floor went, they were so ill-prepared for the extreme price reaction that that created that they basically didn't have the margin and couldn't cover that move. And actually they went from being a huge broker to going bust in literally a matter of minutes. And obviously it was a thing that stood out very much so over the years. Having seen that in a major size client just get annihilated by a market move in a matter of minutes. So then taking action, the likes of interactive brokers. Robin Hood, obviously, is the one that's in focus, giving this kind of low commission, new culture that's created easier access to these markets. And what this has led to then is the depository trust and clearing corp. They're kind of short until the DTCC. They said to have deemed significantly more collateral from its member brokers because of this excess volatility at the moment. And what Robin Hood is said to have done the FT citing people for the matter was that at least 700 million dollars were drawn down via credit facilities with a number of big Wall Street institutions like JP, Goldman's, MS, Barclays, Wells Fargo. This, of course, has created then a narrative for conspiracy that, you know, this is the brokers protecting customers is a facade then for facilitating more better relationships with their institutional backers. Because obviously they're getting these credit lines from Wall Street in that respect. But quite honestly, I think if you cut through this kind of very emotional situation that these people are expressing at the moment and understandably so, you know, it's not right that they're not able to exercise their freedom to operate in the market and do as what they say in the truest sense. But, you know, the reality is that this is a purely operational risk reaction from these particular companies to facilitate this type of interaction in the market. So it sucks. But, you know, as far as these kind of conspiracies that no doubt will go through these online message boards, I mean, I think you're getting a little bit carried away there. This is just a natural order of how these things work. And so, yeah, I mean, a political context as well. I think there was a little bit of read across, wrote some notes here about how I saw one person commenting. I thought it was a little bit interesting that it's better to face if you're Robin Hood, it's better to face the anger of your customers now, rather than let this thing get even bigger to then ultimately when it does harm probably then not the more sophisticated people who are into this trade doing these types of plays early. But when the mass start jumping in who are uneducated about exactly what is they're doing and they get harmed financially and badly, it's the company will be held accountable. So is it better to take action now before the beast gets so big that it's going to go bang in the future and the company is going to going to cease to exist full stop. So could well be that they're going to accelerate that now, given the outrage that it's caused. But I think, again, it's probably a necessary thing for them to have done. So the other thing that did happen last night that you should be aware of was that Robin Hood actually did come out last night and they said that they plan to allow limited buys of these securities, these securities being those ones in focus like GameStop. And they said they'll continue to monitor the situation and may make adjustments as needed. They actually saw GME shares rise over 60% last night. So they fell and then they've risen up late hours and reversed the entire decline that they did see. So it was bearing that in mind. So all in all, look, Eddie's going to put out an update on this. I'm not going to talk about it any further for the time being. Let's talk a little bit about vaccines, just some quick updates on some other things. This is just a further follow through of the story that's been developing throughout the week. EU governments under fire over the shortfall of deliveries from the lives of Astra that use executive arm today or require companies to seek to ship their inoculations outside the block or require them, excuse me, to seek basically prior authorization. And this is that idea about a degree of protectionism with EU feeling unjustified that a lot of these pharmaceutical companies are woefully short of their delivery targets that they initially promised. So yeah, just a latest update on what's been a developing story. Perhaps the more interesting one on the vaccine front is one out of Novavax. They've said it's coronavirus vaccine was 89.3% effective preventing COVID-19 in a trial conducted in the UK and was nearly as effective in protecting against the more highly contagious variant first discovered in the UK, albeit against the South African variant. It was a little bit lower down at 49%. But this is meaningful. It's the first kind of real credible study that we've had that really goes into greater statistical detail on the effectiveness on the new variants. And the fact of the matter is it does work on these variants. I guess it's the bottom line. So good on twofold, two, two different fronts, one on that side on the effectiveness on the variants and getting some concrete clarity on that. But to just more vaccines coming to market, obviously, it's going to be beneficial for the overall distribution globally. Quick look then at the calendar for today. Sorry, as this morning is concerned, you've got the German data coming out later on this morning. So 855, you get the unemployment rate out of Germany. Followed by then the German flash GDP number for Q4, which we're expecting a flat reading after the bounce back that we had of 8.5% previous. And then going into the US afternoon, you've got Core, PCE, Chicago PMI and the Jan Final University of Michigan figure. Again, from these data points, I'm not expecting too much in the way of reaction, even though these would typically be quite important. I don't think they really, in context of the recent FMC meeting this week are going to be game changers for that thinking of what the Fed are going to do. So as a consequence, I don't think that unless there's a market technically hanging on a precarious level, let's say of support or challenging a resistance point, I don't think beyond just being a spark of catalyst of price movement that these are really going to define a session for today. But nonetheless, I think definitely around the 1.30, 2.45 Chicago PMI, you need to be aware that those things are coming out. Probably the open on Wall Street, more interesting just to see given the volatility that we've had. So monitoring that timings wise, as well as the correlation mix, just generally to get an idea of how sentiment is playing out. Earnings wise, you do have a few to look out for pre market. Caterpillar is probably one of the more interesting and then Chevron, Honeywell, some of the other large cap names as well that are coming out. One of the final piece of news as well, just looking at BTPs. They have BTPs did break out of their range late yesterday to the upside. So yours coming down a touch in Italy. We did have comments last night that the Italian Viva leader Matteo Renzi, the one who initiated this whole new political instability by pulling his junior coalition a few weeks ago. He has said last night he's ready to help form a new government and he refers to a political government but would also back a technocrat government as well. And so this comes as obviously Conti is trying to look to form a new shaped coalition government and getting Renzi back in. Could be a way of doing that. And that averts then, let's say, lowest the probability of snap elections, which is perceived as a more net positive short term for Italian assets. All right, that is it. I'm going to wish you a good session ahead and a great weekend. And I will see you in the discord room on Amplify Live. Thanks very much.