The start of the shortened trading week has been a mixed bag across the markets with the European and London session starting positive only for the US session to pull back into that range and stay locked around the New York opening prices.
The Bank of England released some consumer and mortgage data which came in better than forecasted but GBPUSD was unable to make any headway higher and closed the London session at the opening prices. The ActivTrader sentiment indicator shows the indecisions of the retail traders clearest as it is fairly balanced at 41%-59% for the bulls. Cable has traded through the daily Ichimoku cloud which will now act as resistance and there is also a market structure that will be difficult to get through without some real positive news catalyst.
In Europe, the DAX 30 was the outright winner for the day, trading back up to its all-time highs of 14854, whilst Wall Street started a shortened week in the red on worries around the banking sector, as Credit Suisse shares fell more than 10% after a hedge fund defaulted on its margin call, before all of the equities again melting up after the London close.
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Traders and investors are looking forward to hearing what changes will be made to fiscal policy when President Joe Biden releases details this week on the first phase of his economic plan. There has been talking of around $3trn for upgrading the infrastructure while the second part dealing with healthcare and childcare. Fiscal spending will be a massive addition to the GDP figures and infrastructure spending will actually be very bullish for the USA economy and prosperity.
Gold is once again trading lower, while the US dollar maintains prices above its 200-day exponential moving average. The EURUSD is trading back with Thursday’s bearish range having swept the lows and the 50 ema is still above the 200 ema, suggesting that for the next few days at least we can still assume that this is a corrective move within a larger bull trend. If the 50 was to cross below the 200 a lot of sentiment would switch and the momentum to the downside would continue especially if the underlying fundamentals of Europe around their Covid-19 situation continues to worsen. The sentiment indicator shows that most traders are still holding on to the bullish theme, so maybe we are going lower.
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The Suez Canal has been cleared after the refloating of the Ever-Given ship that blocked the important trade route for several days. www.marinetraffic.com shows the stretch of canal by Ma’diyah now clear of all traffic bar some tugs, but the end of the Suez Canal is still congested with the backlog of ships waiting to pass through. WTI crude futures have between $59.50 and $61.50 and is currently looking more likely to trade at the highs than come any lower. More than 400 vessels are waiting to pass through the canal and there will be delays to the delivery of energy and goods as a lot of shipping diverted around the Cape of Hope instead of waiting, which can add 7 days as well as costs.




Later this week Oil will be in focus again as OPEC+ meet, in which oil producers are expected to maintain lower output levels, keeping the low supply higher demand narrative alive, though this gets tempered by the increasing lockdowns and uncertainty in Europe.