Have you sorted your Premier League fantasy football team for the upcoming season kick-off tomorrow? Hot topic on the desk as people frantically change their selections second guessing pretty much everything. Top tip – set the alarms for Friday as the first 4 game weeks have Friday evening matches. My downfall last year was taking out Haaland early who then proceeded to score a quick fire hat-trick the next game week – sometimes the crowded trades do work! This week has felt like a long one in…

I have to admit I have played Uno at various points in my life without ever fully understanding the rules. Can you play a Pick up 2 on a Pick up 2? Can you play a Pick up 4 on a Pick up 4? Plenty of arguments over the years and I still don’t actually know but if you are looking for a career change and love Uno I’ve found the job for you. Uno is currently hiring a ‘Chief player’ to play their new game – 4 hours a day and a weekly salary of $3824!! Not bad. It was more -2’s than +2’s today sadly…

Not a huge amount going on today which gave us (all hopefully) a chance to catch the important parts of the Lionesses progression to the quarter finals of the World Cup. A great achievement and although it wasn’t the best performance they managed to find a way to get through (on penalties of all things) and progress to the next round. A bit like today in Equity markets as it wasn’t a great day (Stoxx 600 flat), but we continue on to tomorrow fairly unscathed. There was a real sense of the summe…

Having been at meetings pretty much all of the morning I was about to try and do one of the sneaky ‘will-anyone-notice-if-I-skip-the-Wednesday’ manoeuvres until I got a very welcomed (and rare) compliment from than none other than our U.S. colleague Jared Lechner. Notoriously hard to come by it must be said, maybe it was more of a comment, but he used the phrase ‘free-flowing’ and ‘unique’ so I took it as a compliment and couldn’t then skip todays. There is a fair amount to catch up on too – al…

I have barely got my head around AI (honest answer is I haven’t) and now I’m having to check Twitter X to check what this LK-99 is that our resident Twitter X scroller and Charts Guru Nick Glydon is talking about. A new room temperature superconductor material apparently that scientists and physicists are in a hurry to put together. There is even a betting market on it which shows a 50% chance of being replicated before 2025 (and was 25% not long ago, so there is a bit of momentum) . The implic…

“Where to next?” I was asked by someone who missed last week’s earnings deluge fun as the EuroStoxx 50 climbed through key levels in seemingly unstoppable fashion whilst they most likely away somewhere nice and hot with a cold beverage in hand! The 2007 high of 4572 is the first target and if we keep going like we are then that will be within striking distance by the end the week. The week started off on good footing with some more Chinese stimulus headlines and various different regions making…

I know I may be late to this but I’ve got really into BBC’s ‘World On Fire’ these past few days. I missed the first series but that is what the iPlayer is for and I love myself a bit of World War II docuseries action so its right up my street. Some storyline’s aren’t the most believable but us sales-traders know it’s all about the telling of the story rather than the story itself and this does that. The story we have to tell today is a positive one and although we have doubted whether we will e…

Well that was a bit more like it! All it needed was a disappointing miss from Europe’s biggest company to spur some action into what usually is a fairly quiet day as we wait to hear what the FOMC have to say for themselves! 7pm the big moment and we expect +25bp to 5.25% – 5.5% and a peak of 6% though real rates are now above 2% and becoming restrictive. We think the economy needs nominal rates of 6% and real rates of 2-3% for inflation to return durably to 2%. The June CPI print that showed he…

The year is 2037, Taylor Swift is President of the United States of America, Cristiano Ronaldo is back playing for Man United for the sixth time aged 52 and the Euro Stoxx closed at 4397.5, unable to break through the 4400 level for the 1845th time of trying. Holiday blues setting in hard this morning as I logged in to find a small deluge of earnings to sieve through amongst a largely stale European tape with the Stoxx 600 managing to eke out a 50bp gain but we are still rangebound! The bad new…

Has anyone been to Montpellier airport yet this summer? What an Airport! Hands down the smoothest, calmest airport experience I have had in a long time and this was despite having 7 young children in tow. The real highlight was with a 2 hour delay (hard to believe) thanks to French Traffic Control (which seems to be a theme) they allowed us to go to buy duty free bottles of rouge which they opened for us and allowed us to drink on their terrace – c’était superbe! There wasn’t too much to rush…