 Hello and welcome to CMC Markets on Friday the 27th of July and this quick look at the week beginning of the 30th of July and it's been a fairly decent week for equity markets in general, I think boosted by the fact that we haven't seen an escalation in the trade rhetoric between the United States and the European Union in the wake of this week's meeting between President Juncker of the European Commission and President Trump. I think the fact that they're prepared to talk some of their differences out does bode well but what it doesn't do is I think put to bed any concerns about an escalation in the trade war. If anything I think it refocuses attention on the tensions between the US and China. Be that as it may we've seen decent gains in equity markets this week. We've got US second quarter GDP coming out later today and I think as we look ahead to next week this afternoon's number could have a key focus in terms of US interest rate expectations ahead of next weeks or the coming weeks non-farm payrolls and US employment report and wages data. What we've also got in the coming week is the Bank of England rate meeting and inflation report and Mr. Carney has a decision to make. Will he at the very last minute disappoint market expectations as he has done on so many previous occasions. I think the barriers to the Bank of England not raising rates are nowhere near as high as they once were. It's also important to note that it will be Ian McCafferty's last meeting as a UK policymaker. He will be being replaced after this meeting by Jonathan Haskell and Mr. Haskell is probably slightly more dovish in his outlook than is Ian McCafferty so I would argue that the coming meeting on August 2nd will be the last chance that the Bank of England has to push interest rates up by 25 basis points. Now if they fail to do so then I think the pound could come under further pressure because I think if they don't hike rates in August then they probably won't hike rates in November given what's going on with respect to politics and Westminster and the shambles that is currently going on there. So in the context of that and the fact that if we get a decent US GDP number that could push the dollar up we need to keep an eye on a couple of key levels on the cable. First and foremost I think the upside resistance on the pound comes in with this trend line here from the highs that we saw at the beginning of June the end of May. So we're sort of looking in and around around about 132 AT 133. On the downside we've got decent support at 130.70, 130.5 which corresponds with this low point here. If I draw that in for you that gives you a decent indication of roughly, roughly where we are with respect to that. Slightly get rid of that. So there's decent support through this corresponding low there as well as the low at around about 129.50 which we saw in the middle of July. So it's the Bank of England meeting and inflation report. I think the expectation is we may well get a rate rise and if we do then it's really about the guidance going forward. I think it's unlikely the Bank of England is going to suggest that we're going to get another rate rise this year. I think then it will be really determined on whether or not we can expect to get one before the UK leaves the EU in March 2019. Also some key levels on Eurodollar because we'll have a whole host of manufacturing and services PMIs for July coming out next week on the 1st of August manufacturing PMIs on the 3rd of August services PMIs and as we can see from this chart here we've got a really lovely sideways consolidation in Eurodollar. The upside of that comes in around about 117.30, 117.40. We could see that tested in the wake of the US GDP number or we could see a test of 115. At the moment what we're looking to see is whether or not this sideways consolidation breaks out either towards the top side or towards the downside. Yesterday's ECB meeting would appear to suggest that the European Central Bank is in no hurry to signal a significant date for the raising of any of its key reference rates. So on the 3rd of August we have the US employment report. Again fairly decent numbers, headline numbers are fairly good there. We did see the unemployment rate tick up to 4%. Last month that was largely as a result of an increase in the participation rate which does appear to suggest that there is still a significant amount of slack in the US economy. So once again we want to be looking at the wages numbers and whether or not we're able to get anywhere near that 2.9% that we saw in January. We've also got the Bank of Japan rate meeting as well in light of recent speculation about the Bank of Japan tweaking the yield curve. Certainly in the context of this uptrend here there's decent support around about $1.10.5 on dolly yen. As long as that level holds and I think is a good chance we could well retest the highs of July above $1.13. So very much a case of buy the dip while above these key moving averages at $1.10.5 and around about $1.10.10 where we have the 200-day moving average. Also a big week for earnings in the wake of the Facebook disappointment and the Netflix disappointment. But again on the flip side of that we've seen good numbers from Amazon and Alphabet. We've got Apple's Q3 earnings out on the 31st of July and again with little in the way of new products I think really it's a question of what a handset sales looking like is the iPhone X starting to show signs of slowing down. Certainly the average price of the iPhone sold has been falling in previous quarters so I think I'll be looking for evidence of a further slowdown in the average selling price for iPhones and will the when will Apple indulge in any further stock buybacks. We've also got UK bank earnings coming out as wealth. Lloyds Barclays and RBS we've already seen that TSB's taken a massive hit on the back of the IT scandal so I think it's difficult to sort of really get any lessons from TSB's numbers given the fact that they will have been seriously impacted by the IT outage and I think there are still some residual effects from that but certainly with respect to Lloyds Barclays and RBS I'll be looking for any signs as to whether or not credit growth is slowing down in the UK economy. Certainly not seeing any evidence of that in the headline numbers retail sales numbers have been fairly positive there has been a little bit of a slowdown in loan growth but certainly nothing to really be concerned about. So that's it for this week thank you very much for listening, it's Michael Houston talking to you from CMC Markets.