 Okay, very good morning. It's Thursday 22nd of October, so I hope you're doing well. Just a quick word before I begin the regular briefing, as you can see to the side of me here. We will be hosting a US election preview event on Friday the 30th of October. So at the end of that week, then the following week, we'll get the US election live, of course. So it's going to be a really great event. We're going to cover everything that you're going to need to know both for short-term, intraday trading perspective and also the medium and long-term implications as well if you are managing a portfolio of different assets. We're also going to go through things like retrade using our own technology to relive actually trading the S&P 500 over the 2016 elections. I think that would be interesting for you guys to see. And then also we've got a few other special guests as well that are going to be joining us giving their insight as well. So check out that registration page. I'm going to drop it into the various different chats and onto the YouTube channel and hopefully I look forward to seeing you then. But more details on that page. But look, let's get stuck into what have we got driving markets this morning. And overall, I'd say it's a fairly neutral open as far as my perception from sentiment. There certainly is a few things for me to update you on in regards to the US stimulus talks, the COVID situation, and now some apparent Iran-Russian interference in the US election. And so a few things in focus. But overall, I'd say despite those factors, things are fairly flat from a sentiment perspective. US index futures are marginally lower at this point. Predominantly due to the things that I've just mentioned, but there's no real drastic movement being seen as yet as far as the Europeans perception has been concerned so far. T-notes are flat, gold's down slightly but has been just edging up ever so slightly but down around nine bucks at 1920. And in the currency markets, the dollar did gap up a little bit in what otherwise I'd say was kind of during the initial part of the US close which was negative by around 0.1 to 0.3% across the major US indices. There was a little bit of flight to quality to the dollar, bumped it up but don't forget the dollar was very weak yesterday. So naturally then, a bit of a pullback. We were up around two tenths, a quarter of 1% but we've eased back to just a 0.1% gain now in the Dixie. So both Euro-dollar and cable have just edged up a touch. And cable obviously consolidating after its biggest rally we've seen since March after I'd say the inevitable, basically Europe and UK are back on in talks for Brexit now. Going forward but let's just have a quick look at what we've got here. And starting off with the main stories and going to look at the stimulus situation. This is kind of the ongoing main focal point for markets. It remains a particularly sensitive issue which is moving market price in a day trading environment. So where are we at? Well, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin apparently made a little bit more progress yesterday. We continue to hear this pretty much every day. They're going to meet again and continue their discussions today. However, a couple of things to be aware of. Pelosi did say she believed negotiations with the White House could produce a deal on a fresh COVID-19 relief bill despite Senate-Republican opposition but she did say that it may not happen until after the election. So that's 0.1% in terms of timing. Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said yesterday the White House is now looking at a 1.9 trillion in relief. So remember they're getting a little higher toward that kind of Pelosi goal of 2.2 trillion. But not close enough that they're going to get a deal of course because no one really wants to do a deal and as we're going to discuss this is a lot of the political strategy we've been discussing throughout this entire week. According to Fox News last night there's almost no operational way that the House and Senate could move such a stimulus bill before the election. Remember it's not just that Pelosi and Militian agree and therefore there come stimulus. There's a procedure that needs to happen in Congress for these things to get congressional approval. Several congressional sources have told Fox News that they believe this is an effort by both sides to give the appearance they're trying to get a deal just before the election and so therefore defined as political posturing. So again it's very similar to what we've been discussing throughout this whole week for the various different reasons I won't go into because we've covered at length. But again I don't foresee US fiscal stimulus coming before the election. I stand by that call at this point in time but that as I've always said doesn't mean that the market still might not be sensitive to some of this commentary as we continue to remain vigilant as it comes out throughout today. So again no set time for those discussions usually there it comes around London time late afternoon early evening when we start to see some real movement towards the close on Wall Street is when typically the batch of comments have come out and if you think about it just logically that's because then that kind of bookends the day for negotiations and conversations that these guys have been having. So that's the latest there. Going to go through the news from a chronological perspective. We did have Tesla last night not going to spend too much time on this because we're going to focus more on the macro perspective. Tesla yes from a single stock perspective their shares did move up around three and a quarter percent actually fairly small as far as Tesla is concerned in aftermarket trade in terms of their variance of share price after an earnings release. The company reported its fifth consecutive quarterly profit on record revenue of 8.8 billion US dollars boosted by an uptick in vehicle deliveries sales of environmental regulatory credits to other automakers which led to a rise in their share price. Elsewhere oil is trading around a 40 buck handle at moment. It did briefly dip below there during the Asia Pacific session. It has just perked its head back above though that kind of level. We're currently flat but you remember yesterday we had a pretty decent down day in crude oil. Obviously domestic gasoline inventories rising the most since May. US fuel demand weakens because of coronavirus and let me just give you a bit of an insight there. In the US for example hospitalizations for COVID-19 have reached a two month high led by the Midwest that era we've been focusing on for the last couple of sessions. New York State's new virus cases have now exceeded 2,000 as well for the first time since May and perhaps that's also another key area of course given how populous it is that tri-state area and given the movement of people due to work and other things of that nature that could be a real area of contention if those numbers start to elevate in a fairly steep fashion. So worth keeping an eye there. Otherwise higher COVID cases are being seen pretty much globally at the moment. Travel restrictions of course being imparted in the likes of the UK ever more so. Now I think it's Yorkshire to follow up with like Manchester that we had yesterday and now Western Europe various different countries are imparting ever more stricter movement rules. Infections in Germany are at a record high at the moment and so on and so forth. So all of this of course is going to impede general perception of future demand and what we are seeing is the EIA have reported a fifth straight weekly build at the nation's biggest storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma. Obviously this is much more due to US fuel demand concerns and weakening on that regard. But what that's led to then is that crude infantries in Cushing are now over 60 million barrels for the first time since May and you'll remember what was happening in crude oil in April or May and we're knowing near that at the moment they're going to be wrong. But that was when we had that real crisis point about the over capacity situation that was happening in Cushing that led to that negative futures price at the time. The spread between WTI's nearest contracts has now weakened to its widest contango structure nearly a week and that would be indicative then of these general market perception of concerns of oversupply going into weakening demand at this point in time in the future ahead. Otherwise this was the other thing. Bloomberg making quite a big deal out of this. I think that they're personally, I think they're doing that because it's their story and so they're giving it a pump. I don't believe that this is personally too surprising. Russia interfering in an election seems to me like just the status quo in modern politics but let me get you up to speeding exactly what's been going on here. So a top American intelligence official has said that Russia and Iran have attempted to interfere in the presidential election. The voter information obtained though, this is on the Iranian side, was publicly available so no hacking was involved here. Iran apparently has been sending threatening emails to Democratic voters that pretends to be from right wing a proud boys group in attempt to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage Trump's political efforts. Remember of course Iran and Trump have never really got on, harping back to the various sanctions many over the course of his presidency in his first term in the White House for example. And so Iran very much at center but separately Russia is said to be using a range of measures to primarily against Joe Biden and Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost Trump's candidacy on social media. Now to give you a bit of context, in September Facebook and Twitter found social media accounts linked to a Kremlin-linked control farm that was used in 2016. And if you remember this is one of the most contentious issues when we look back to that memorable kind of twist that we saw with the UF Rendon and Cambridge Analytica and Russia interference with Trump getting elected in 2016. So that's Facebook and Twitter. Microsoft has also reported that Russia and Iran have attempted to hack into political targets ahead of the election as well. So this could be one of the points that does come up if we do find ourselves in a particularly contested close-run race with no immediate outcome. That idea then of a protracted long period of uncertainty on who actually has won the election is what's leading to then this will complicate it by giving someone like Trump then ammunition to say that the election is rigged and so on and so forth. So yeah a couple of things to be aware of there. One thing then talking about the election and polls has been something we've been talking about for a while which has been the convergence now between the two lines. That is Biden and Trump where Trump has been gaining and Biden has been losing some of his lead. National polls which have been as wide as 10 points have now narrowed to 7.5 in Biden's favour. The battleground polls have remained in terms of the gap about the same 4 to 4.2. Both candidates picking up a little bit but in the betting markets it has seen some fluctuation having gone from extremes of 70-30 to 60-40 we're now at around 63 to 37 at the present point in time. So one thing to bear in mind of course is tonight I think it's 2am for London time going into Friday morning it's the final presidential debate happening in Nashville, Tennessee. The first round did draw over 70 million viewers and just given the timing you would imagine that it could even top that this time round. So that's something we'll be talking about of course in the briefing tomorrow and to see how those two candidates have gone on but again they're the kind of theme from round one. Actually that's what created this divergence in the polling that really saw Biden start to take a lead and it wasn't so much that Biden really smashed the first presidential debate it was more down to the fact that the whole event in itself was a bit of a debacle in the fact that Trump was just trying to just jump in on every single word and with that point they've now looked to stop that by imparting two-minute silences on the mic for candidates to speak in tonight's debate and separately expectations were exceedingly low for Biden to perform against a confrontational president and actually he did okay and so okay is great when it comes to then very low based expectations. Okay Brexit is the other final thing just to talk about. Obviously the Pound saw a really strong rally yesterday I mean just having a quick look at the chart here this was the Sterling move this was the best move that we've had in a number of months for Sterling did come into context as well of a weakening dollar which helped exacerbate the move and if we look here on a daily continuation we've broken out what was an area of kind of consolidation I guess from around 129 to around the mid 130 area and we found a bit of natural resistance I put a rectangle coloured box here to define that I think that's a pretty solid level of resistance now where the price ran up and kind of ran into an area of fatigue which was just around 132 in the futures but you can see now it's the peak of price back in early March the market respected that as well in late July early August as well as finding support points in the latter part of August and early September before the break lower when Johnson put out his first credible threats of leaving the EU so yeah I think a lot of the news that came out yesterday is now priced in I'd expect that to be a strong level of resistance on the upside going forward because now it goes back into ruin negotiations once again and as far as that is concerned for me I don't think they're going to make any type of headway anytime soon so we've gone through this whole kind of pantomime show of absolutely zero credibility I always thought and hopefully if you've been following my explanations over the last couple of weeks I pretty much thought that this is exactly what was going to happen the whole Friday blowout of Boris looking to walk away it's purely political kind of leverage in order to just continue on with the negotiation and manage his kind of domestic political angle at the moment so things continue I don't really think that there's going to be too much more now there's going to move the market in the short term if anything I think Sterling could well be susceptible to a little bit of a pullback certainly if the dollar starts to pick up if people do start to kind of become a little bit nervous about the lack of stimulus the increasing COVID numbers if that starts to fire up the dollar a little bit which was particularly weak yesterday because I really don't buy into this weaker dollar Biden sweep kind of narrative because I really don't think that that's going to be the case I've got a special guest here can you say hello say hello okay off you go so yeah the dollar if that comes back I think that even the euro as well which obviously has seen some decent rallies of late I think is susceptible to a decent downward move under the right conditions so if I'm looking at euro here you've got a pretty nice level of a setup which is looking at the overnight Asia-Pacific low you've also got those previous highs that were seen back two days ago as a kind of structure of key level to look at if that support line is taken out and in the short term here you can see cable on the 30 minute is just testing the range that defined this lower base of the Asian price activity any breakdown here in Sterling I think we go straight down to 131 which would be that previous high here I think that would definitely be on the cards the pivot level is just resigning just below because I think the market is a bit overstretched from yesterday's price movement okay quick look at the calendar what's the summary of the session ahead we have pretty quiet UK European open it's really very much a US centric session and everything I've been talking about really at the moment European seem fairly comfortable with the UK mainland European restrictions and COVID situation the US numbers do worry me slightly because they are heading in the wrong direction and I do believe that if it wasn't for the fact that there's a US election at the moment then actually I think the market would be in quite a negative state right now given the fact that the numbers are increasing and this has troubling signs because at this point in time there's obviously no real restrictions happening in the US so that would lead to the notion that these numbers have still got some way to go to the upside so I think that's really a key theme to look out for obviously ongoing headline noise around the stimulus package which typically tends to come towards the end of the US session so really quite late 7, 8, 9 p.m. London time data-wise in the US you've got your jobless claims you've also got existing home sales I wouldn't really worry too much about the flash consumer confidence reading out of Eurozone that rarely moves the market and speaker-wise there are a few interesting things Chief Economist of the Bank of England and the Haldane and the Governor Andrew Bailey are speaking at 9.30 and 10.25 London time two real key members obviously we've had some very dovish commentary come out some MPC members this week and they continue to be fairly mixed actually in their comms at the moment over the notion of negative rates and I still think that from a sequencing point of view from a monetary policy from the bank it's still very much an increasing QE asset purchase program or before then they embark on this route of will they or won't they do negative rates and remember the next Bank of England rate decisions are that far off now so we are really looking for some continued guidance on these matters then we've got Beds Barking, Beds Kaplan speaking later fixed income, we've got some UK auctions coming out and from an earnings perspective the bigger ones to be aware of AT&T, Intel, a couple of the airline firms American Airways, South West and they've got Dow Chemical, Coca-Cola as well which will be coming out pre-market ok guys we're going to leave it at that, let you get on with the session as I said don't forget to check out the link for the US election preview we're going to run 6-7pm London time on Friday 30th October everything you're going to need to know to get ready for the main event so hopefully I'll see you there as well ok thanks very much guys, have a good day