After a hearty meal and plenty of family time, the citizens of the biggest consumer culture on our planet will commence with the age old tradition of Black Friday. In this unique American holiday, accidents can happen and frequently do. It’s not uncommon to see videos of people physically fighting over the last discounted big screen TV or getting trampled by a stampede of screaming shoppers when a big chain store opens their doors at the time of a major sale.
Over on Wall Street, they’ll be watching these videos closely, not to gauge consumer sentiment of course, they’ve got plenty of graphs and other tools to do that, but because that’s what Americans do.
Market Overview
In the last few moments, we had some breaking news out of Germany. It seems that the two main political parties are actually ready to talk.
The second largest party, the Social Democrats (SPD) previously mentioned that they didn’t want to join Merkel’s government because they preferred to be in the opposition. However, now that Angela has proven unable to form a government without them and the country headed for re-elections the pressure was too much and they finally caved.
This new update may actually cause more uncertainty. Just because the SPD is entering talks doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to enter into a grand kumbaya coalition. Their demands of Mrs. Merkel will likely be very high as the longest ruling leader in Europe is now on the ropes.
The Dax 30 has just opened without much reaction to the news so far. Let’s see how the day progresses.
By Popular Demand
Already several colleagues and clients have asked me to speak about the ongoing situation in South Africa. Today, it’s crunch time for the geopolitically unstable nation.
For those of you who are not from this particular region, here’s just a small sample of what they’re going through.
There are plenty of videos just like this on YouTube showing dear President Zuma’s inability to speak, do simple maths, or even count. In March, Zuma took a harsh decision to fire an extremely competent finance minister, ostensibly due to his meddling in the President’s own financial affairs.
Within the next 24 hours, two major ratings agencies are expected to make their final decision regarding the status of country’s debt. Economists are forecasting that a downgrade from S&P is more than likely but if Moody’s delivers a downgrade it would be a much bigger surprise.
Watch the USDZAR pair closely. Note that the chart is inverted so a move up represents a weakening in the Rand.
Ethereal Run
As the crypto-market continues it’s advance, we shall continue to split hairs over which is going the fastest. This is simply due to the competitive nature of the human spirit. “Who cares that all the cars are driving really fast, I want to know which one will be the fastest.”
The fastest car today is Ethereum with a gain of 5.77% over the past 24 hours. The level of Ethereum transactions is rising steadily and it now processes more transactions per day than any other cryptocurrency. In fact, according to trustnodes.com, 52.3% of all cryptocurrency transactions happen on the Ethereum Blockchain, compared with 33% on Bitcoin itself and only 1.8% on Bitcoin Cash.
Ethereum has also been the most steady crypto for the past few months only joining in on most of the major rallies a bit late for fear of a pullback. Here’s the chart since January showing a total return of 4000%.
After passing the second hump that peaked on September 1st, we’re now in breakout territory. Next level of resistance is at the all time high of $428.17, which is now not far off.
Also watch bitcoin over the weekend. It’s really close to it’s all time highs now as well.
