 Okay, very good morning. It is Monday 21st of December. First and foremost, I hope everyone is safe and sound. I mean a hundred percent. That's the most important thing at this time, given the worsening situation we're seeing with COVID globally at the moment. You know, given the job that I do, I have to talk about these things and I have to talk about them as objectively as I can but never forgetting and being sympathetic of course to the people that have been impacted by COVID-19. So I just wanted to put that out there first before I really get into the briefing this morning, but let's just have a look at things and what's going on this morning and get you up to speed and very much so a busy reopening of electronic trade last night. So for those guys who are on the private feed on Amplify Live, Tim went live last night at around 11 p.m. was live for a couple of hours last night because of the fact that there was some quite significant price movement across the different asset classes and mainly because of the fact that the COVID-19 situation in the UK has developed very quickly with this new variant. Cases are on the rise very quickly and it's meant that a number of countries now have suspended any incoming flights from the UK and so consequently that coupled with a I think unsurprising lack of progress in the Brexit talks has meant that the pound gap lower and has remained under considerable pressure since the overnight sessions. You can see here we closed in Stirling Futures on Friday, up at around 135, kind of 39 type handle and we were down in the overnight session, the low that was seen during the Asia Pact trading hours is around 133.49 so pretty significant move already. In terms of that pound movement actually just a quick look at the chart it's not too indifferent from what we were talking about as potential scenarios last week. You remember this was that weekly chart that we had in focus and we were kind of suggesting that we could have squeezed up on the breakout through that important around 135 technical area. We basically hit pretty much to the tick the 618 fib retracement of actually the entire high to low from the referendum move going all the way back to 2016 before the markets taken this latest turn and obviously gacked down and under some certain pressure this morning and this is kind of what we were anticipating to the extent of a lack of Brexit deal making markets continue to be quite sensitive to the weight growing of the risk or probability of an OD increasing coupled with the ongoing worsening situation with COVID in the UK requiring further restrictions to be put in place which of course are going to impact the economic recovery. Elsewhere then Europe has followed suit so the dollar index is up fairly significantly this morning around 0.43% so Euro dollar has come off as well and we've come down to a fairly interesting level here as well from a technical point of view. If I just shrink the chart a little bit so you can see it here you've got going back really throughout the month of December this was resistance back on the 3rd and 4th and 14th of December and we come back down close to that in some of the overnight selling pressure that we see but again much of those moves came at around 1-2 a.m. this morning London time so since then we have had a bit of a bounce and now on any recovery be looking at that S2 as a pretty decent area of resistance then potentially then for a continuation of this move when the US come in in a few hours time if we come back up to trend back down toward the bottom end of that range and that significant technical level at 1-22 handle in the futures. Elsewhere equity index futures actually a little bit mixed but definitely not as pronounced selling pressure is what we're seeing in Europe given the more tangible risk of the spread of this new variant of the virus emanating out of the UK so the Dax has already come under some pretty severe pressure at the reopening of trade electronically last night and here this morning as Europe's come in it's just had a brief false break then back on that key low so that would be an area to watch you can see here the previous resistance point we had on the 15th had a couple of tests overnight in Asia but it has held and it's just looking a little heavy again this morning ahead of the cash open shortly in a few hours time. US stock futures though been a little bit slower to react we have had some stimulus news where it looks like they are going to sign off the latest relief package and perhaps then that's just counteracting things a little bit and it's also might you know for part from a flight to safety in the dollar might be helping that just bounce a little bit on confirmation of the stimulus deal getting done but I do think that there potentially is some room when we go into North American crossover for them to really wake up and smell the coffee of Europe's reaction to what we've seen with this latest covid developments and subsequent really restrictions that are being put in place and so what we're just saying is seeing here S&P's just printing fresh lows just breaking beneath the low from the Asia Pact session but I think there's some room there for some downside in US secretaries catch up but perhaps that move won't really come until until the US come in and then in oil as you can imagine with the two commodities oil lower gold higher all on the back of this news I've just been talking about so you know oil really did see a really strong move to the upside last week you can see going through 47 48 and 49 approaching really up to around those highs that we were printing going all the way back to where we were right at the beginning of the year really in the fourth support in the fourth and 10th of Feb that we had before the kind of breakdown in price that came later in that month and so bit of a pullback that does mean I'd say oil perhaps susceptible for even a little bit more further on a retracement a key area on the higher time frame be looking at really around 46 26 in the futures on the more kind of focus chart on the 30 minute candle you can see the move a combination really of demand repricing given the situation now with COVID particularly in mainland Europe but also not forgetting as well the situation in the US is still particularly severe at this present point in time and coupled that then I think with some profit taking given that run up and in the end of the year good time to book some profits on that trade perhaps with all things considered and then gold yeah really did shoot up last night you can see this was the reopening of trade we gapped up a little bit took a bit of time to get going then at midnight it really started to liven up and then we were bid all the way into just recently now a bit of profit taking as Europe's come into the market here at around 1912 marking the high but you can see technically we broke out of what was an area of resistance which was holding some of the price action you can see here toward the back end of last week this would have been Thursday just short of the 1900 dollar hand up we've managed to bust through that this morning on the back of this news as we continue to attempt to reverse some of that first initial I think it was the 10th or 9th of November positive Pfizer vaccine news that came out so gold well bid I think one word of caution here is that quite a bit of that move did occur in the overnight session early on there would have been a lot of people tracking the news of the weekend and quite rightly as we were covering on our Amplify live stream last night at around midnight 1 a.m. that was the opportune time to catch some of these moves I'd say if there's going to be a secondary follow-through in a continuation of the trends perhaps we've got to wait till the state's come in really to to see that unfold but let's get into some of the headlines and talk about the news then and I'm going to kick things off by talking about this covid situation in particular focus on the UK where the health secretary Matt Hancock as you would have seen has warned that the new strain of coronavirus is quote out of control and suggested parts of England will be stuck in the new highest tier restrictions I for until a vaccine is rolled out now now as you will know that in itself is a kind of tenuous hint toward the fact that perhaps we could remain in these high-level restrictions as I'm going to discuss perhaps even more stringent going into full nationwide lockdown or even more so the you know the worst economic situation that would weigh most heavily on the pound will be reverting back to the type of lockdown that we had in the spring which I do think is of a fairly high probability all things considered the way that this virus is developing and with this potential super spreader event irrespective of the latest measures that have been taken at the end of last week from the UK government here's a here's a map then given the changes these were the current tiers you know took this on on Friday when the announcement was coming and this is what the new tiers look like so as you can see here it's the southeast that have gone into the highest tier four status at the moment some other areas brief isolated counties as well but as I said it could be then given that we already know that the rollout of the vaccine is going to go in phases we know as well that there's the complexity of the fact that with Pfizer for example although they try to offset it there are logistical manufacturing and therefore distribution issues to that particular vaccine faces given its ultra its need for ultra cool storage on transportation and storage so these sorts of things are a hindrance because the first people to get it obviously are the elderly frontline workers and then people with underlying conditions so it will likely mean then that these tiering systems will need to be fairly onerous and in place for a fairly long period of time which I think is a definite adjustment then and hence consequently the movement in markets to where we were expecting things to be developing through Q1 Q2 of next year I think that has now shifted as we were talking about with the virus last week we were kind of continuing the quite quite bearish on the situation this is one of the things that I was talking about quite a lot at that time which was the event of Christmas and I did think that it was somewhat inevitable that a government would have to concede on this idea of loosening restrictions for that period I think it was previously from the 23rd to the 27th I was looking at this company they're called Edge Health and they basically run kind of quantitative analysis over different data models for COVID-19 and they provide information then to supply to other industries and bodies and so on and they were looking at that if family gatherings lift the R rates so the reproductive rate of the virus by 30 percent and the reason why they're saying 30 percent is they're using that as a reference point for what happened after Thanksgiving in parts of the US then their projections suggest in England will deaths will peak at over 4,000 a week by the end of January which would be considered to be higher than where they are at this present point in time so here this is running a data model over if the UK government were to impose a full nationwide early lockdown i.e as of today and obviously that's not the case at the moment then this would be the projected direction of the weekly case rate in England this would be under scenarios then of 10, 20 and 30 percent reproductive rate and what the case numbers would potentially look like so they're looking at a worse case here of kind of just over 400,000 cases in a week period the other thing this has led to then is Germany France Italy the Netherlands Belgium Austria Ireland are among those that have suspended flights from the UK outbound train services to the channel tunnel have been halted and Canada have halted also all UK flights so this is definitely the first response just given that although it hasn't been pinned down yet the evolution of this virus through the new variant supposedly from the southeast of England which has seen a very sharp acceleration in growth in the likes of Kent and surrounding counties and so precautions are being made across Europe so hence the reason why you know this new kind of fear now of a accelerated spread because health officials have said that the new variant is up to 70 percent more transmissible but there is no evidence that it is more deadly and there's also an evidence to suggest that it reacts differently to vaccines which of course would have been a massive risk for markets if testing and and the vaccine are redundant redundant well then there really is no protection against this new form of COVID-19 until they can come forward understand the actual mutation more and then look to rejig those those things which are going to take a considerable period of time one word of warning there is there is a little bit of contrasting views here there are other medical experts i was reading over the weekend who basically were saying that it's way too early to draw those definitive conclusions that this latest version of COVID-19 is is not as deadly and so that is something to be mindful of and something to be to be looking out for in terms of potential significant impact that that can have on markets overall then the conclusion in my mind is kind of twofold i think if anything the way that this is now evolving given the fact that there's Christmas which even with these measures undoubtedly will probably see cases accelerate even further not forgetting as well that you know at the moment the weather really hasn't got that cold and that's going to be a key period of through January February so things are going to be particularly testing and i think from a markets perspective for me it's really about the vaccines i read some headlines this morning that AstraZeneca will be looking to get approval by the end of this month and really that couldn't come sooner because although Pfizer and Moderna have been kind of fast tracked and first to market it's about the net cumulative amount of other companies with their vaccines coming to market that's going to help them speed up the inoculation process now so that's going to be very key vaccines their approval their manufacturing of which has been a little bit problematic in the lights of Pfizer but pretty much all the pharmaceutical companies so far have rolled rolled back if not halved their manufacturing targets over recent weeks so anything like that i think it's going to be particularly sensitive for markets going going forward the other thing then is this kind of roll out vaccination program and i guess that'd be a net consequence then of that manufacturing if there are any logistical issues this is only going to prolong the current worst state worsening state of affairs that we're in at the moment the other thing then is the risk of strict and long-lasting lockdown measures this is something i was writing about in my kind of note for the for the week ahead i do think that there is a real possibility here that the current tier four for for the southeast will ultimately result in the rest of the UK going into full national lockdown like that we were already in in november i do see that as probably the most likely case particularly post the christmas period and then whether or not we go even stricter with some of those specific rules to take us back to the spring i also think it's a significant chance of that as well which does mean that i think as far as the the pound is concerned again it's got to be repriced in because it's going to be somewhat compounded by the increasing risk as we go through post christmas because i really don't see a brexit deal happening between now and then and then up to deck 31st before we get a decision about what exactly is going to happen with brexit you know with the the chance of a low deal increasing on that front what is actually the latest on brexit but just before i move on to that the european council arm meeting of government representatives is supposed to take place at 10 a.m this morning london time in regard to their catch-up on this latest covid situation on brexit what is the latest here well shock horror they didn't strike a deal over the weekend but to be quite frank given everything else that is going on and fluidity of this latest covid development and the response that's being coordinated across europe i can understand why brexit's probably not at the the center of attention at the moment for a number of the heads of state the latest here is that britain we're insisting over the weekend that basically the european union needs to shift on its position in order to cultivate some type of breakthrough negotiations british officials insisted EU offer on fisheries and fair competition level playing field remained unacceptable that was the current latest state of affairs it came with the latest european kind of commentary at the weekend suggesting that look a deal need to be done on sunday otherwise they're going to walk away because it won't give enough time for EU parliament to vote through any type of deal obviously that time has come and passed and despite everything that both sides are saying they're going to reconvene start talking again in brussels as of today so it's the usual i guess sequence of events i would say and so they will continue to be brexit comments but i think timing wise now for me i think if there is a deal to be done or a delay which i do think is a growing chance of that happening which is um at the moment legally obviously the transition is december 31st but these things can change of course they can and so i wouldn't be now i'd say too surprised if they just given what's happening at the moment with covid 19 and with the potential risks surrounding the christmas period if they just delay this and by what date i don't know but buying themselves another period of time to just hash out these latest talks in order to just deal with the more i guess cataclysmic event which is that of a health crisis unfolding with covid 19 so at the moment then there's still some risks assigned to increasing pressure on the pound not just on restrictions and covid but also on this prospect of potentially no deal because as much as my feelings might be saying or expectations growing towards an inevitable another extension here until that happens then the risk is of a disorderly no deal brexit which of course would have ramifications heavily on the pound in the immediate reaction so thing is still to monitor the one thing i would say is that if you're going to be trading throughout that period particularly between christmas and new years things typically are quite thin and that does then exacerbate potential price movement so things could get quite choppy as we go into the end of the year the other thing from overnight which is a little bit more positive was us stimulus so congressional leaders have reached a deal on roughly nine hundred billion dollars spending package after census struck a late night compromise in one of the final hurdles which was in regard to the dispute over the federal reserves pandemic lending authorities the plan the latest one that they've constructed overnight would provide direct payments of six hundred dollars to most americans three hundred dollars per week in enhanced unemployment benefits through march and there'd be 284 billion dollars for the paycheck protection program that provides forgivable loans to small businesses this latest relief plan is going to be attached to a one point four trillion dollar bill that would fund the federal government through the fiscal year of september 30th 2021 last night obviously there was a risk of a government shutdown but trump signed a one-day temporary extension of government funding passed last night by both the house and the senate to avoid that partial shutdown so very much now expecting that to come through later on today the interesting thing about this would be it's obviously somewhat of a relief that from a real tangible point of view this is going to happen government funded people are going to get these stimulus checks and so on however be interested to see whether we're going to year end is this a case a little bit of by the rumor cell the fact markets have been very bid on the back of the step slow step progression in these talks us equities as we know been clawing out new all-time highs and lights of the nasdaq and the s&p you know is this just an opportunity now to book some profit just going into year end that coupled with as well the ongoing covid situation which is getting worse not better at present could we could we see that start to play out as we go further forward could well be the case the other thing was a meeting that happened between russian and sally officials in riyadh at the weekend and mosco the energy minister he's going to be no backs can be flying out to meet with iran's or minister i think today or early this week basically the end result of their conversations the saudis and russians was the opet plus will react faster to changes and take a more hands-on approach with the oil market thanks to an accelerated schedule of monthly meetings now if you remember the new plan that they had the increased production of 500 000 will start to kick in in the new year but they're then also going to review that status of those supply cuts every month rather than six and three months as they were doing before in the past and so they're just kind of putting out the storm that look we're ready to act if need be and definitely if covid starts to develop and this new variant spread resulting in many more stringent and lengthy lockdowns not just in uk mainland europe but across the world i think definitely opet plus will have to reconsider the trajectory of their plans in regards to their supply pack at the moment quick look at the other things that are happening this week as you would imagine the calendar is fairly quiet particularly today which i think just draws ever more focus to those main things we've been discussing into play for market sentiment today and then going further forward aside from covid the u.s. stimulus brexit the other things we're looking out for on a data perspective is us gdp we're going to get the second reading of q3 gdp on tuesday you've also got personal spending on wednesday it's likely to be soft given weak retail sales numbers but the manufacturing data suggests durable goods will be relatively firm as according to analysts at i and g durable goods coming out on wednesday with the core pc deflator then we obviously go in the run in thursday christmas eve is usually a short trading session friday is christmas and then boxing day u.s markets are normally open but uk mainland europe markets are normally closed in observance of that holiday as far as my coverage doing these briefings they'll be as per normal today tuesday wednesday amplify is also going to be putting out its outlooks for the forks equity and commodity market each day on those first three days of the week so keep an eye out for that and yeah that's about it for the for the briefing at the moment so once again i wish everyone the very best for the moment stay safe stay positive and i will see you in the anthly live chat room all right thanks very much guys take care