Morning Update – 12/02/16 – by Arjun Lakhanpal

Morning all.. Another down day on Wall St but it was looking even worse before a suggestion that OPEC may be thinking of starting talks turned everything round into the close but S&P still closed down 1.23%. Oil rallied into the close and in Asia we have see a further 4% rally. This didn’t help stocks much though with Nikkei down 4.8% after being off yesterday, HK down 1% and China still closed. Markets are crying out for a circuit breaker at the moment and the US is closed on Monday and some markets will close early today so we may quieten down a bit; hopefully! USDCAD is drifting lower as Oil rises. The rebound being attributed to a headline out of the WSJ quoting the UAE energy minister as saying that OPEC stands ready to co-operate on production cuts. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen such a headline in recent weeks so it remains to be seen how credible this really is. This may help stocks somewhat in Europe. DAX futures up 58 points or 0.67%. It was the move in Gold which was perhaps the most eye catching of all yesterday. Gold closed up a massive +4.14% yesterday (although had been up as much as 5%), smashing through the $1,200 mark to eventually close at $1,247. That move was in fact the largest single daily gain since January 2009 with the metal now up close to 17% YTD already. Looking at the day ahead, there’s a busier calendar for data for us to sift through today. The key release of note in Europe will be the Q4 GDP report for the Euro area where current market expectations are running for a +0.3% qoq print. We’ll also see Q4 GDP reports for Italy while in France we’ll see the latest quarterly employment indicators. Euro area industrial production for December is also expected. Good Luck..