Morning Brew August 23 2021

Good Morning,

Even Main Stream Media are looking at the Jackson Hole conference for a paradigm shift in the markets - it is expected the plan to end of QE will be laid out and monetary policy may become tighter.

The hosting Kansas City Fed announced on Friday, the annual economic symposium would be held virtually and not in person as planned. This may be a hint at a more dovish stance, the fact that the central bankers do not meet in person gives the opportunity to put focus on the danger of the delta variant. As Jerome Powell`s position is up for confirmation and Joe Biden finds himself under severe pressure for the mess in Afghanistan, the last both need is market turmoil.The  full agenda will be available at http://www.KansasCityFed.org on the 27th in the  morning in Europe 

Equities traded friendly on Friday with the Dow up 0.65%, the S&P up 0.81 and the Nasdaq 1.19%, over the weekend the positive mood continues and most Futures are friendly. Cause for the positive sentiment seems to be that China has reported no additional new COVID Cases. The USD Index fell from 93.73 on Friday to 93.30. EURUSD is trading 55 pips off Fridays lows at 1.1715 and Gold and silver are at 1785 and 23.22. Speculators cut their USD Longs on the CME in the week to the 17^th seeing he move towards a stronger USD as complete is seems.

Bitcoin rose 5 % on Friday and continues to break the 50k level over the weekend.

Nvidia Corp's planned $40 billion acquisition of British chip designer ARM hit a major hurdle on Friday

I expect  the trading focus this week to be firmly on Jackson hole and other events taking a second row seat, unless there are any strong surprises. Today Global PMI can be important.

It might be a good opportunity to take a look at your portfolio and check how happy you are with the level of risk you are running going in to one of the key monetary policy weeks this year. As stated above, I can well imagine the fed can be more hawkish than expected but it never hurts to take a critical look at your positions and consider what would happen if you are wrong

(Refinitiv)