It was my 40th birthday early this month, my wife surprised me with the present of going to Hamburg to see the band Gorillaz, which is awesome. So this next talk CSS I'm just going to be bouncing around because I've just come back from that. Because I like to find out about stuff in advance, I'm going via Istanbul Airport, so let's check out the website for Istanbul Airport. How bad could it be? There's no question you want to ask. The answer is, yeah, Istanbul, Istanbul. What I found is basically a perfectly preserved website from about 15 years ago. So the reason I'm actually talking about this tonight is because I've not seen a thing like this for a very long time, and it had me thinking about some of the vintage techniques. Notice how long it's taking to load as well, and you can see a lot as it's actually loading here. Notice how you've got the backgrounds aren't actually in here yet. It'll get there maybe eventually, maybe. This site weighs in at about four meg. The back end to it is, it's actually built off SharePoint, so already if you're familiar with that, you'd be crying tears of just sadness or rage or both if you've had any experience with SharePoint. It's an older version of SharePoint as well. The back end is ASP.NET 2, which is from about 2007. Something like that. .NET 1 came out in 2003 or 2003, I think. .NET 2 was around then, so it's pretty old. This is actually a responsive site as well, which is amazing. I'm really pity the developers behind it. We're still waiting for it to load, which is why it doesn't quite look right at the moment. So that's the back end. Why does that justify the front end that's going on here? Back in the mid-2000s, you didn't have shortcuts for designing anything. You had to do things the hard way. CSS support was negligible across browsers. You couldn't do things like gradients. This gradient here is actually an image. This was a technique of the time where if you wanted anything that looked interesting, you needed to load custom images. The image editors at the time, Fireworks, MacroMedia's old thing, which turned into Adobe and got killed before Sketch was a product, they enabled you to take things and slice them and put them straight into this. A lot of those image editors are still built in that same mindset of how you put sites together. They haven't really worked out what CSS is yet. If we were building this now, this would just be a really simple CSS gradient. But again, there was no such thing back in 2017 for the Istanbul Airport development team. You can also see a lot of the design intent. Everything's got a gradient on it. If you're familiar with the first iPhones up to a version five or six, I think, everything was really embossed that had to look like a physical thing. Everything needs to jump out of the screen at once. We've gone back from that to flat design and now we're somewhere in the middle right now. But flat was the antidote to this. The images probably won't load here. This is also typical of things that happened in 2007-ish because, again, a four meg site built back then, bandwidth wasn't so great. I think there is something like over 100 images on this one page. Just trying to do so many things that you couldn't do reliably in CSS. I say that, but if you knew your CSS at the time, you could do it anyway because you know what you're doing. But this was trying to pull this off was cutting edge at the time. So that's not going to launch. You can see what fails when these things fail. I've got really hard to read text because I'm relying on a background image. The good technique at the time because you couldn't rely on gradients appearing is you could set a solid background image of something that's close to what the gradient is going to be and that would prevent this kind of thing from happening. Before we get into some more bits, I'll talk more about the architecture. ASP.net is a server architecture. So what's that relevant? What relevance is that to the front end? Ah, has it killed my battery? Not yet. What happens, these days you have single page applications where you have the server that sends a whole lot of JavaScript to the client, which then calls APIs and basically most of the logic is on the client. You have server architecture where server renders something, sends it to the client, lightweight hopefully except if it's got ads and there's a ton of JavaScript, but the idea is you're not sending as much every time. So there are two architectures. This method is somewhere in between and my theory is the people at Microsoft who started writing .net had not really that great a familiarity with the web and wanted to try to break it similar to what we saw with trying to break autofill. So things like the back button, they had to work around so the back button wouldn't work because you don't want people to hit back in a browser. There are lots of hacks and things like that, this disabled basic browser behavior which is terrible, but this is what .net was all about at the time. From my own experience writing in .net I basically threw most of the framework around and ended up writing my own things to make it work properly, but this is not the case for these guys which is why it's such a good example of what not to do. I mean trying to pull this off now would be hard, but back then this is a pretty default kind of thing. So what .net does is it has all the server side architecture typically written in C sharp sends things to the client with lots of heavy JavaScript as well and this is why this thing weighs four meg because it's got about a meg of JavaScript, a couple of meg of images, a whole ton of CSS that's compiled from the server, but you have none of the advantages of a single page application in that every time you do something you have to hit the server again and the engineers at Microsoft were close to what they needed to do for single page architecture or single page applications in that they wouldn't even rely on a simple thing like an anchor because you know an anchor has only been in HTML forever so they had their own custom versions of what an anchor is or a button click or anything else like that and that was in the form of a do post back. So every single interactive element when you click on it you're not actually firing an event you're firing a custom Microsoft event which then hits the server and does something after that. So they left no stone untouched and completely gutting and ruining the browser, absolutely incredible. This doesn't look like it's going to get any better, let's just zoom in a bit more and I'll see if I can, here we go. So the images are taking a while to load, the problem is you've got lots of different images, browsers are very conservative about the way they load things, you don't want to load everything at once if you don't have to. So what happens is as soon as you invoke that code the browser does a whole lot of requests to the server to try to get those assets. So what we saw there in that delay for the background images to appear was the server sending about five or six different image requests trying to get the backgrounds. This is obviously not a great experience. You could fix it two different ways, one is having CSS so at least you've got some solid backgrounds but since this was built in the Microsoft.net mentality basically they took Windows development and said we'll do exactly the same thing on the web because what difference is there? So that's one method you could use CSS but no, it's not to that. The other method is you could actually case your images before you need them and this is probably the better method, you'd do both anyway, the good way is you'd use the CSS for solid backgrounds and you'd preload your images as well. Now these days you've got preload and prefetch and all sorts of things which are meant to speed up websites, there was no such thing in 2007. What you could do instead is actually use a JavaScript call to just ping the images as you go. So the header of the page because we didn't know about performance much, you'd hit the images one at a time until everyone is cached in the browser. When we did know about performance we moved the JavaScript down the bottom instead. So let's go a bit further. Every single state, every single interaction that you do in CSS and don't think about these days was done the hard way but here we go. So now I've got it cached, it's fast although the browser is probably struggling anyway because it's doing stuff it doesn't know how to. To make things more difficult, every single one of these menu items seems to oh no I've clicked on something, that's all right I've got about three months. Oh god. Most of this is cached at this point and it's still taking forever to load. The reason for that is this browser is absolutely straining. I'm using Firefox developer edition, this is the new like really fast Firefox engine and it's still struggling with this thing which is just incredible. And imagine this in 2007 when Firefox come out. It would have been a much earlier version of Firefox. It was back when we didn't get a new version every few weeks. Machines struggled on these and think at the same time the iPhone was introduced around the time of this technique. Trying to load that on an underpowered iPhone it just wasn't good. See these are actual image, so these are probably just bold, there's nothing going on. So there's genuine CSS at work here. Let's see if I can, oh there we go. One of the other things that browsers did at the time is they would cache an awful lot more than they do now. Browsers have got a lot more conservative because loading the same thing every time is not so great because this site loads so many images. It's actually pushing itself outside the comfortable browser cache. So that means every time you navigate to another page it's actually like the cache is pretty empty or at least a lot of the assets are out of there because there's just so much that's throwing in there. None of these images are compressed in any way either. This was a bad technique at the time but image compression was hard work. You had to use multiple methods to get a JPEG optimized for example. If you started in Photoshop you'd save as a JPEG then you'd run it through about three or four utilities and then you'd get an image out at the other end that actually resembles something you want to use. Same thing with pings, actually there was a different process if you had a ping or a GIF. It was really complex. So things are a lot easier now where you've got lots of things like Webpack that just take care of it before you don't have to think. This area you didn't and this site shows the consequences of what would happen if you didn't do that. Siri is probably going to go away Siri. So we should see the same bad hover effect again. There we go. We've got rendering problems that you can see here. This is cut off because you're actually using layers of images on top of each other. Like if you're familiar with the way the DOM works it's all nested. The nesting here because there is so much HTML going on is really complex for the browser to render. So you'd get rendering problems like this all the time. This is great. Unreachable code after a turn statement. We're also seeing rounded corners here. You couldn't do rounded corners in 2007. So you had to use images even when CSS was around. Like roundedness is not something people do very much because we're all flat and square and everything these days. Seems to be the nature of the web. Someone comes up with an idea. They can't do it with the current techniques. So they have a horrible way of doing it and then wait for the browsers to implement it. By the time the browsers come up with the implementation we don't want it anymore. It's really nasty. So what you would do to have rounded corners, there were two different techniques. One was to have a rounded bit on this end, then the middle, then the rounded bit on the other. That was the best way of doing it because you've got the smallest possible images. And you could use a one pixel thing in here because it's the same one pixel all the way across. They've done it the bad way where they've got one image for this thing and it's also fixed. So if this extends beyond that width, like if you go with something that's longer than here, you'll see a gap because that's just not designed to cater for that. Oh, you might repeat it. No. If it repeats then you actually repeat from here. Yeah. So that's even worse. So that's our background image here. If we have a look at the HTML, look how much is going on on this. Oh my God. I don't really know in styles. Yeah. But the server does it for you, so it's all okay. So as much as we're looking at this, so there's your span, there's not a span. There's a div that must be part of the hover or the drop menu, I guess. The index one probably. Yeah. So somewhere here, we've probably got the, but it's just not loaded properly. So something's gone wrong. The margin left looks weird. It's an underscore margin that you zoom in. You must zoom in a bit, that's why you've got the progress. Browser zoom in that era was a problem. They're usually pretty good now. If we zoom out, we'll try it and see what happens. No, it's not making any difference. Yeah, it's just a rendering problem. It's possible that the image hasn't loaded from the server. Again, when you hammer the server too much. What's that? Is it because of the display now? Well, this is the other thing as well, it's about to get to. Like we use CSS for state, hover, focus, et cetera. What if you didn't have CSS? What if you've never heard of CSS? What if you thought, what's, why bother with CSS? You'd use JavaScript for all of this. And if you use bad JavaScript, you get conflicts where things don't load properly. Yeah. So at least they've got the list item on this. So we're using an on mouse over and it's an inline on mouse over. This is just awesome. I see there we go. And you can see, it might be a bit difficult to see. You can see there's a pixel out on the right, like rounded bit. Another classic telltale sign of bad web development from the era. The other thing we're seeing here as well is that you have this background here. What they've done is they've used, I'll just go in and inspect it again. There's my image. Okay. What am I actually trying to do to the background here? Am I trying to darken it? Or am I trying to put a new color in there altogether? If all I'm trying to do is darken it, you can use, and you don't have CSS, you can use an alpha ping with just a gradient on there with black to white or black to transparent. And you can just put a darkened on there instead. Even with CSS before you could do gradients, that was the better way of doing it. Of course, we're seeing all the bad techniques here. So this is the bad way of doing it where you have another completely distinctive image. The advantage of using a black to transparent gradient is that you could apply it anywhere. So anywhere where you want to darken with that gradient, you could do exactly the same thing. Since there's already a gradient on here, maybe you'd want something else there. The box shadow and everything wasn't something possible in CSS, so maybe you want something else for that. But you wouldn't have to work that hard, at least not as hard as we have here. So you could potentially deliver a site like this under 100K or 4Meg, depends which one you prefer. How are we going for time? We're running time. Okay, I'm not gonna spend too much longer on this because it's torturous. There is flash somewhere on this site as well, just to add to the kick in the pants the thing generally delivers. Okay, what we're seeing here, containers weren't very flexible. And then you could do it where the content shrinks up there, but then the evil boss man comes along and says like, well, why does that one that high? And this one, the other height, when every screen is the same height. So the method is you have a fixed height, like pixel height on the container and irrespective of anything else that goes on, you end up with the same. So let's inspect that and we'll have a look at how that works. Oh, we've got a clear fix on here. So they've even used min height. So that's a little bit more progressive than some of these were. It was really common in this era that you'd have like literally fixed height because min height is something that's relatively new as well. I say relative like within the last 10 years. So this is again, vintage web design lesson. If anyone uses any of these lessons you've learned here, then I'll come and find you and personally stop you. Human purposes only. So basically you'd set your height and that would be your height. If it breaks it, then you'd push the thing out. And one of the other reasons for doing this, all satisfying the boss man is if you have a look at the background, you can see this overall gradients here. So if I zoom up, the way that you did that, again, you've got no CSS or you didn't know about CSS because you like writing Windows applications. You'd have an image that's actually that tall or as long as you can possibly imagine the thing to be. And that's what you'd set your background image to be. You imagine a site that can scroll page on page on page. You could generate an image that would be that tall. And I've seen those horrors before. So it's a background image, so it doesn't impact on the height. If you didn't know how to write your code properly, you'd still have a fixed height anyway because what's responsive mean? So let's see how there's a form. One of the classic features of, I say feature, but bad features of .NET, like early.NET is everything was in the form, the entire page is a form. And that was the roundabout way of trying to capture any event and hijack it and make it bad. If you're using React or something like that and you see that you have your main on the outside, it's kind of like that, but without any logic behind it. I just saw a class ping. That's really impressive. I don't know if I can actually reach this element well. There's a height 100%. That's great. Ah, tables. Wow. And this is a telltale sign of where it's built. This is MSO content table, Microsoft Office. So someone started in Word and exported to create this. No human hands touched this code. I'm still not reached. I love all these comments in here as if someone would actually want to maintain it. This was the best practices. Sorry to say again. That was the best practices. What's that? The commenting section. Yeah, that was a thing at one point, yeah. You didn't necessarily have template engines. There were a lot of static sites that were just static sites. Come on, background image. You've got to be there somewhere. I'm so fine there, so I think I'm just gonna... Ah, there we go. All right. Ah, so this is a one by 1,000. So at least this is only one pixel across. That's good. But it's one by 1,000 pixels down and that's your background because again, gradients existed but these people didn't know about them. There's another one on here. Oh, that's meant to be in the background but it's not loading. Because they've overridden it, this is actually loading in the background anyway. So how big is this? That's a 70K JPEG that's loading in the background that you don't even see because performance. All right, I'm gonna leave it there but feel free to go to the Istanbul website and see what it was like back in the day. I mean, if you know anything about me, I've been building these things better than that, hopefully, since 98. So by the time this stuff came around, I already had a good idea of what to do and I inherited sites like this. It's really quite amazing what you can learn about code. Basically you end up stripping out almost everything, get down to the words and then rebuild it from scratch. And that was, for me, 2007 spent a lot of time doing that kind of thing. All right, any questions? Anyone want chocolate? Is everyone just lost in the horror? Yes? So it looks like a decent site. Is it really a decent site? Decent, how decent? It looks graphically okay for a two zero in the same site. Yeah. But the problems with it is it's really heavy as much as anything. If that was your intent for the design, fair enough. But you'd use, all of this would basically be in CSS. You would not be doing all the image slicing and everything. It was a lot of work to try to produce something like this. And it's very extensive to browse this website. Yeah, that's why I'm glad on the Wi-Fi and not tethering. Next page is like Alice 1, 2, 3 and V. I might see if I can switch it to, I think it's actually sniffing the browser to see what it's meant to be. Does anyone remember how to switch the navigator in Fifox? All right, I need to use... Oh, do you have to go in the mobile mode or something? Yeah. There's some right-click then. But I'm still not because it's actually sniffing the device. Try this, I think. Yeah. Does it work? No. It might be here. It's nice to select it in one field. No, that's... No, that's... I've got no throttling and it's... It's synthesizers. Yeah. Let's try that. Oh, no, that's not going to help me. If Fifox doesn't have it, I know Pro has it. If Fifox has had it since the 90s.  On that scale. It's around somewhere. But basically, this is another bad thing. Before responsive design, you treated devices separately. So they're way of handling a mobile thing. So someone said, we need mobiles. Oh, great. They actually sniff the browser. So all the same code loads, but it renders an entirely separate view on your phone. So you've still got your four-meg of desktop beauty, but you get that as well. I think it's interesting how big the end of it is. Oh, it's massive, isn't it? It's made of two parts. Yeah, none of this is actually loading properly at any point because there are meant to be things at the top. I think there's extra stuff that's meant to be up there as well. Every time I load the page in a different browser, I see something different. It's pretty awesome. There's one better, like there's a lot over this one. But I think... Probably a carousel that didn't look correct me. Yeah. It seems to me like an answer. No, it's meant to be part of the site, I think. Oh, no, that is an ad. It's an ad, right? So here I am at an airport site trying to find out what my transit's going to be like. And they're trying to tell me about Grab. Did you find out what you were looking for? Did you get a better life? What I was looking for was an airport map because I've got a pretty short transit and I wanted to make sure I could get my way around there to get a souvenir from my son, basically. So I did eventually find the PDF documents. That's got the map of the airport. I think it said interactive, but it's a PDF. I don't know if opening is interactive or not. Anyone else want to know about how bad things were back in the day? How do you share points? No, you just need to use your... You should be handing out chocolates. Where do you start? If you think about, like, a CMS. So I have content I want to share. Or share, wow. Holy, I can't even remember the early CMSs. It's, to some extent, it's an extension of Office. But it's, like, taking Office and putting it on the web with all the bad things that come with it. So SharePoint is meant to be a Microsoft CMS. It was designed for internal use only. But you can make it public-facing if you want to. But you don't want to. Internally, it's... I've done a lot of work with CMSs and all that kind of thing. A lot of enterprise-level stuff. People pick SharePoint because, like, boss-man at bank because they have read about Microsoft or someone turned up and had a great presentation. It's awful, absolutely awful. If you worked on WordPress, like, learning how to do WordPress themes can be a little bit challenging because you have to learn all the terminology and everything. But at least you can modify it. With SharePoint, like, you might be able to change the color to green instead of orange. But you're still stuck with whatever generation of SharePoint's idea of design is. If you want to go away from that, then you have to rewrite so much from scratch. So it's great. Actually, it's average when it's out of the box. If you want to change it, then it's horrendous. I have spent lots of my career working around SharePoint. I don't put it on my CV because I never want to work on it. What's the difference between SharePoint and Frontpage? Frontpage was an editor. Where SharePoint's an actual site. It tells you a lot that this is usually free for enterprise. It's Microsoft that's like, this is free with everything else that you're already paying for your licensing, just to try to lure people into the ecosystem. It has improved drastically from this era. But it's still way behind anything else. Most of the selling point is they give it to you because you've already got an office license. If you see SharePoint anywhere, run. Squarespace done wrong. There's nothing good about it. The best implementation I've worked on with SharePoint is where we had a SharePoint back-end. So the people updating the content used SharePoint and we had a completely custom front-end. Because that was recent enough that you could actually use an API to communicate with the SharePoint database. We still had to do a lot of work to massage that data out because SharePoint is nasty. But at least we had a proper front-end to it. And it was fast. Even the new SharePoint, Microsoft have improved a lot for their approach to the web. Certainly from this era. But it's still pretty nasty. They still don't really seem to get it. I've said lots of bad things about Microsoft over the years because of things like this. Anyone else? Alright, shall we do our wrap-up stuff?


Okay, very good morning to you. It's Thursday the 3rd of September. I hope you are all doing well first things first We do have tomorrow the live payroll webinar that myself going to be joined by the head of trading Pierce We've got Sam Alex will everyone's going to be online to cover that live and take any questions And hopefully you can see us in action So remember to go on the link in the registration in the description of this video and in the comment section And also I was looking at some of the analytics yesterday for the YouTube channel And quite a few people aren't subscribed So I'd really appreciate it if you did hit that subscribe button and you'll get the alerts every day from me and the rest of the Team covering different areas as well But let's get straight into it. And what have we got this morning? Continuation really of some source. We had a momentary Sell-off at the open on Wall Street yesterday in the Nasdaq and Someone was pulling my chain slightly yesterday because I entitled the YouTube Briefing that I that I posted as Nasdaq to infinity and beyond and someone commented Wouldn't it be funny if your comment was the top in the market and then obviously we sold off quite aggressively at the open And that person was feeling pretty pleased about their their call But there goes the point that I was trying to say with equities yesterday and I continued to hold that view Really, which is you know this amazing recovery that we continue to see any time that there is any time of shakeout Profit-taking if you want to call it that when we've squeezed up to these new highs Particularly given the way that the tech sector is outperformed Against the other indices then it's just another opportunity to buy into and I was talking to some of our interns Yesterday and I was kind of just you know a lot of them were quite new to trading particularly things like technical analysis And I was kind of doing a test where I'd click on a chart and roll my Chart down like this and and I'd say to them you tell me when you're not allowed to sell You're only allowed to buy and I'd put the cursor and I'd say tell me where you want to buy and they said okay Yep there there and so using just very simple just areas of Congestion before or where the market has responded in support and resistance Just on simple horizontal support lines and the notion being that they don't want to short the market They want to be long, but where to get long and you can see how the when they were marking up these rectangles yesterday with me And how the market really did react to these levels initially here the break lower when it did come a little bit Volatile around the cash equity close in Europe, but again responding technically to its respective S1 on the day in those previous areas of resistance and support as well So Yeah for the time being equities continues to remain on the ascent the Dax I can see here on the left It's just having a bit of a bit of a pop as we've just gone through the cash equity open This morning. We just had a bit of a retest up around that initial Eurex Gap up that we saw just given the general performance on the clothes on Wall Street and some of the Domestic markets overnight Asia Pacific region One thing that people were talking about yesterday just one. I'm on stocks Few people were looking at this idea of rotation away from the tech titans that have led the gains this year With the likes of apples you can see here on the left-hand side down about 2% Tesla came off at one point. I think they were down as much as 15% yesterday and zoom video were also down a lot. I Would I mean a lot of people think that rotation out of tech means in a broader market rally is seen as a net positive sign To actually it's a sign of confidence about the broader economic recovery if all equities start to rise Rather than it being isolated to just a small portion of these tech giants just dragging everything up Now I would agree with that assessment in terms of a theory. Yes a more broadening buy-in to the stock rally is definitely Important, but I would say people are just making a little bit of a mountain out of a molehill yesterday Apple shares in my mind They've been up what some 8% or so in the prior two-day sessions Zoom shares had an incredible 25% pop on their earnings just a few days ago and Tesla have just been going parabolic of late So a pullback of some 15% and then closing the day down in in kind of high single digit percentages to me That's just a reflection of the extreme nature of some of their individual share price moves that they've had so yeah I agree, you know, I still don't detract from the point I think this equity rally still got some legs in it at this point, but talking about a rotation Away from tech and it's a broader sign of the economic recovery. I think you're getting a little bit ahead of yourself there I think that yesterday's moves The the pullback we've seen in those aforementioned shares Apple Tesla and zoom It's just a reflection of some of the recent price share price activity isolated to those individual stocks But nonetheless, look some of the other areas you can see some some strong gains overall, so Some decent moves there. The other thing overnight that we did have Was some Chinese data Chinese service sector activity this follows on from the the decent manufacturing number that they've had earlier in the week and The service activity grew for the fourth straight month. You can see here We've gone back above 50 which is that symbolic level to measure the PMI numbers about expansion into contraction So that brief period that we had and the initial Outbreak of coronavirus in in Wuhan obviously impeded this the most when it went into extreme lockdown back in February Remember so it was front-running of what we had in the lockdown say in more like April late March in the west of the Western world and We've continued to rebalance since then and hence the reason why another component of the relative low VIX low volatility conditions General stability in markets coming from yes, of course the massive firepower coming on the force of from authorities central bank stimulus fiscal stimulus But China is a key component and economically things have continued to stabilize on the breakdown of the data new orders rose markedly Despite easing further from June's recent record While employment increased for the first time in seven months in fact underlying within that service sector in China So some other positive signs there before I Really move on though. Let's just have a quick look elsewhere across over the other charts and what's happening so Equity index features in the US. I'd say a fairly sideways this morning The S&P is pretty flat We're both trading in the futures and that's like an S&P above their pivot for the moment So still in close proximity to the push-ups at all time highs yesterday The tax as I said is finding a little bit of resistance around that overnight high bit of a false breakout as the initial volumes in the Futures pick up through the cash open this morning elsewhere oil still a little lower We're going to talk about your rack and compliance in a moment as one of the headline stories But obviously came on some selling pressure Breaking down through a couple of key technical levels yesterday Pre-actually even the infantry data which on the headline reading of course would have been technically more bullish with the sizable drawdown of near 10 million But if you look here I'd say there was a combination of a few different things Despite that golden cross yesterday, which would normally be a more bullish signal I think technically you have a catalyst here with a breakthrough that 21 DMA, which has been a really nice strong area of Support generally from a technical perspective and you broke through that low We had in the 27th and I think that just exacerbated then the initial break that we saw at the time around that 42 36 that contributed to that run lower So some good support though seeing around crude just around that 41 handle that was that low We had on 7th of August so worth keeping an eye there and you prefer the breakdown Obviously got a $40 handle and those lows we had back on the beginning of August We're coming at 39 58 if the trend were to continue Elsewhere then currency markets. I'm going to talk about the euro quite a bit in a moment That's really the predominant main story from this morning and FT exclusive the ECB Coming out in full force trying to verbally manage the resurgence of the euro we've had in recent weeks so it follows on from Philip Lane the chief economist of the ECB yesterday who was doing a similar thing So I'll get into that in a moment, but both major currency pairs lower Bank of England Treasury Committee meeting yesterday And they too were talking about the options they have for still firepower on the Modestry policy front and so therefore As a net result the dollar strengthening Dixie yeah initiated by the ISM manufacturing good number We had two days ago that boosted things now you're getting the last ECB talking down the euro More positive policy easing options coming of our way of Bank of England in some of the recent commentary that we've had from Ramsden and Bailey and so Factory order activity yesterday in the US was pretty decent despite the miss on the ADP figure So the Dixie is making a bit of resurgence. So having broken through 92 in the Dixie We're now all the way back up to around the 93 level and that's continued to weigh on some of the major pairs Subsequently also weighing a little bit on gold. So after we had that 2000 rejection Symbolically and technically two days ago. It continues to remain on the back foot for the moment. So we're training back to around 1938 at the moment, but albeit if you're looking at the last couple of weeks of price action, that's kind of mid-range Obviously the range is quite extreme given how volatile gold has been. So, yeah, that's the overall Flavor of what's going on. Let's have a look at a couple of other things because you know with equities moving higher yesterday There's a few other things as I mentioned, there is quite a bit of dubbish rhetoric coming out overall from central banks, but also a little bit of Perhaps stimulus optimism US Treasury Secretary Steven Manucin has restarted talks with Nancy Pelosi As well and obviously that comes after that impasse We had two weeks or so ago where they weren't able to come to a compromise deal on this new level of fiscal Stimulus coming out of the US But that's a key component to keep this show running in terms of the overall risk appetite and Vaccine optimism has been something which is being mentioned as well and let's have a bit of a catch up What's going on? Not so much with COVID cases, but with the vaccine situation and this is one of the main things that people are looking at this morning and Sinoffy in partnership with Glaxo Smith Klein So you're talking about two of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world They administered their first patients with this experimental COVID-19 vaccine On Thursday bringing it a step closer to the late stage clinical trials. It aims to kickstart before year end Although Sinoffy and Glaxo are just now starting their latest trial The vaccine front runners may deliver interim data From their late stage studies as early as this month according to some of the Articles here on Bloomberg in circulation this morning Now one of the things here it comes on the coattails of yesterday The US CDC the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US told states To prepare for COVID-19 vaccine to be ready by November 1st Obviously, this is an extremely aggressive goal And obviously well timed because November 1st is just days before the actual us election So I don't know who donald trump's got on the book at the US CDC, but he's definitely Getting his money's worth there I absolutely do not believe that there's going to be a vaccine ready for them, but I guess this is the whole point of They're just making these comments That does not mean necessarily that there's a vaccine that's ready for Implementation or usage and distribution It just needs to be that there's a trial that said that it's ready as long as he can spin this type of narrative I think that it's a positive in regards to donald trump Which obviously has taken the biggest political hit over the handling of the pandemic in itself Hence the reason why I think It's a difficult one for for trump to manage And why you're seeing him being so persistent on the argument of law and order I think that's where he's going to have a much greater success But yeah, just interesting at the moment There is quite a few people getting a little bit optimistic about vaccines again In terms of the timeline most people were looking out into you know well into 2021 And some of the things being banded around at the moment would indicate being much earlier than that So I think that's also another contributing factor to some of the risk appetite at the moment Let's talk about the euro then just quickly on the chart the euro has come off fairly Very considerably actually over the course of the last day or so remember yesterday We were talking about a pretty big level around this 120 120 50 I know alex on our our trading team was talking about it's a lot with our guys About a good level of technical resistance around those low of 2012 and that period of resistance back in September of 2017 and after that breakout and run push-up that we've had and this quite extreme move to the upside In nature almost being overbought here in euro dollar that it was susceptible for a bit of a pullback and that Overlaid with the fundamental understanding that given just how quickly the euro has risen literally in the course of Going from late june to where we are now in early september I mean we've basically traded from around a 112 handle all the way up to 120 So, you know eight full point move Which is pretty incredible obviously initiated by a number of different factors Whether it be the recovery fund german stimulus general Perception about the euro being a better Positional play than the dollar was a lot of the talk at the time Although that's eased one of the things here then is about The euro being at a level that makes the ECB very conscious about what that does and have Implications then for the european economic recovery So it didn't almost feel somewhat inevitable then at some point the ECB would start to do what we call Um the kind of prevention of further appreciation of their currency by trying to Intonate towards some degree of concern or policy easing to tame the rise in the currency So rather than you know physically intervening like you would do an emerging market currency for example Obviously the euro hasn't got quite that extreme yet But there's almost like these thresholds where the ECB rhetoric intensifies And it's interesting that 120 then has acted as that first kind of barrier for them to look to try and Counter at the euro's recent surge So the actual ft article. What is it saying? It's basically saying that the euro's rise is worrying top policy makers of the ECB who warn That if the currency keeps appreciating it will weigh on exports Drag down prices and intensify the pressure for more monetary stimulus So if you read between the lines then that's them just you know really coming out and and just Just forcefully trying to weaken the euro and obviously a weaker euro In the short term probably gives the DAX just another reason into a fairly bullish backdrop Just given the overall global indices performances We're seeing at the moment The DAX already moving in sympathy with the general gain seen in the u.s But you can see here the DAX just squeezing higher now Getting more of a definitive break that overnight high But the weakening euro will probably help that as well given the heavy weighting that The DAX has towards Export names and a weakening euro would certainly alleviate some of that pressure that they might have been feeling Under the the appreciation of the euro over the last couple of weeks Several members of the ECB governing council apparently told the ft that the euro's rise against the u.s Dollar and many other currencies risks holding back the eurozone's economic recovery And all of this of course is particularly Well crafted in terms of timing because it's the ECB next week. They have their next monetary policy meeting And so you know these things are always planned In regards to when they like to talk talking about this So it's almost like they're already drip feeding it in now ahead of that event Just looking to maximize their opportunity to kind of guide the market with their with their forward guidance So yeah, the euro is quite a big story this morning Elsewhere sticking with the european front. We've had this headline Macron in france his government unveiled a long awaited a hundred billion euro stimulus plan The plan dubbed the so-called quote french relaunch Includes wage subsidies tax cuts for businesses and funding for environmental projects now one of the things here is twofold For one, this is looking at the red bar with it to be indicative of french GDP the blue bar for the euro area And as you can see here, the french economy may shrink as much as 10 percent This year in 2020 which would actually be more than the euro area as a whole Which is anticipated to contract by just eight percent. So all of this of course Is well timed again because macron is up for re-election in 2022 And obviously that might seem technically quite far away The best part of a year or so, but these things take time In terms of the I guess the procedure that needs to go through in order to get these things finalized and implemented And also then to really Start happening But he's already thinking down the road and I think actually strategically this is quite An interesting and well-timed move for him because for me Obviously borrowing Money increasing your debt burden is not a good situation particularly for someone like france who generally The debt to GDP ratio is somewhat Getting a little bit questionable in recent years, but you can almost Disguise now stimulus I feel if you're a government like france and if I was macron I would be quite encouraged to go for these big new injections of stimulus to ensure then My political longevity by doing things like wage subsidies and tax cuts and helping businesses and all these sorts of things So improves my favorability rankings I don't then have to really say that that's hurting debt because I can Contribute it or tribute it to the fact that this was all covered 19 So it's almost like you can get some extra stimulus Into the system under the cloud of covid where not perhaps not necessarily. It's entirely that it's more driven out of your own political agenda To prepare yourself in the best possible way for being reappointed in an upcoming election, which is happening in 2022 so I just thought it was quite interesting this isn't really market moving the the ECB talk and the FT about the euro is way more important than that But I just thought I would point it out the other things then the bank of england Just talking about the bank of england because I briefly mentioned Not just the ECB talking the euro down, but the pound has also weakened a combination Of course a bit of resurgence. We've had in the last two days in a dollar but in terms of sterling We did have the the the MPC members testifying to lawmakers part of their regular procedure Yesterday and the deputy governor dave ramsden said the bank of england has the capacity to increase The pace and the size of bond buying program if needed This does of course comes after andrew bailey last week said the central bank had plenty of room to add monetary stimulus Including negative interest rates now Again, I was talking to a couple of guys about this yesterday Come on some of those kind of junior traders And kind of explaining then the nuances and the use of how important credibility is for then people to believe in this kind of forward guidance Communication tactic that this is ultimately what they're deploying at the moment with the bank of england It's look, I think they're Even though the market might be pricing this later on I think the bank of england are really far away from ever adopting negative rates But as long as you can put those weapons on the table and everyone in that room Ie the marketplace knows that you've got those weapons It might well be that you never actually need to adopt them because the market takes confidence on the fact that they're there In the first place. So I think this is what's really happening with the uk But it does go some way to show though. There are some significant You know potential speed bumps coming for the uk economy You've got a kind of a trifecta of issues potential resurgence of corona virus Obviously kids are going back to school now not just for the kids But obviously do they transmit the disease and pass that on to their families and their parents their working parents and these sorts of things So is there going to be potentially a renewed outbreak on top of that coming with the seasonal aspect of winter is coming? So that's point one You've got a potential spike in unemployment because ultimately the furlough scheme does need to come to a close at some point And obviously that's looming in october And that obviously overlays them with the exact timing of the soft deadline at the beginning of october For when we should be looking to get a tentative kind of deal if you like done with europe and that and itself's not looking great because the e-u chief negotiator Barnier said just yesterday He's kind of pointing the finger britain is shunning any offers to make any progress with these talks So that side of things still looking particularly uncertain at the moment. And then the other thing was Yesterday you had boris johnson the prime minister warning the uk's economic outlook was about to get tough He said As rishi sinak the chancellor admitted tax rises would be required to pay for the economic Chaos brought on by coronavirus and this is one of the other things that i was talking about in a briefing Maybe two months ago or so when everyone was kind of loving rishi Because he was coming out with these, you know the furlough scheme. He was coming out with all these extra things But i was kind of of the opinion more of okay, that's great short term Long term, you know, there's no such thing as a free lunch and someone's got to pay for this And you're going to have to pay for it in higher taxes at some point Which is going to also impede then the ability for the speed of recovery in the uk So yeah, it is it is important that the bank of england Have this type of communication at the moment that they've got room to move to the downside in multiple tools Because things potentially it could get worse and and and johnson is right Things are about to get tougher and so for him it's about political management of expectations now hence the reason Why he used that phrase yesterday, so yeah all in all um, perhaps then There has been a degree of inevitability. I think about the pound obviously the pound has It's been on fire Chiefly buoyed by none other than dollar more than anything else and the fact that brexit kind of deadlines and everything else Um furlough has been so far away, but those timelines are now diminishing And also if we start to see the the dollar having ever come back as we have had and as we go further toward october I do think that the pound will have to start building in some of these renewed risks But perhaps a little early, but but going forward in the coming weeks All right elsewhere oil, uh, this was one of the other stories. I find this absolutely not surprising at all iraq may ask for a two-month extension to implement the extra production cuts It's carrying out as part of the opec plus deal remember the opec plus deal was that non-compliant nations so people like iraq or nigeria who typically don't Agree to the defined quota um They have to then on top of the existing cuts Catch up and make up for the lost cuts that they should have done in prior months that have gone by iraq has not been able to achieve that and they're asking for an extension Is this important for oil? Um, I know oil is falling this morning But I don't really think it's too much tied to this to be quite honest because at the end of the day Other countries like Saudi Arabia always carry the slack for iraq Um, I guess if you were looking at it from a real top level Iraq is a particularly large producer I mean as you can see here in august their output was 3.72 million They are de facto after Saudi one of the kingpings in the middle east in terms of production And if they're not adhering to the deal Then does this in terms of an idea of compliance start to then make other countries Also think that they can get away with it and get away with not being fully compliant And then does that whole deal start to disintegrate? I think that's a little bit far-fetched I think oil's just moving lower at the moment just because I mean technically as we discussed it broken down a little bit A couple of key technical levels in in the near term have broken down So I don't think it's too much to overinterpret to be honest and I find iraq asking for this request is Is as per my expectation overall? All right, quick look at the calendar. What have we got today? There are a few things Going through the morning. We get the final service PMI numbers coming out the eurozone and the uk So just be aware of but these are final figures We then get the us session Where there's two main things really We've got the initial jobless claims and the ism non manufacturing PMI So for the initial jobless claims the expectation is for a number just shy of one million jobless claims have Fluctuated quite a bit recently. We saw a dramatic job drop right at the end of july Where we're decreasing around 1.4 to 1.2 million and then decreased again So this was quite a positive development that was happening It jumped up and down. So at the moment, I think when we're seeing this type of pattern I guess overall what the market's looking for here is this is stabilization to some degree These numbers though probably going to level out around one million for the time being Would be my expectation the extremity of the range For initial jobless would be seven hundred and seventy five thousand to 1.175 million and even at those end of ranges I don't really see too much in a way of a real reaction to be quite honest Perhaps one thing that will be very interesting to watch though is will be the ism non manufacturing PMI And the reason for that is when we had such a phenomenal reading the last time this data came out In fact, the last reading pointed to the steepest month of expansion of the service sector since february of 2019 obviously as the Service sector starts to get back on its feet after the Extremity of the lockdown experienced in april in and may in the united states now expectations for that figure Is for 57 so it is expected to cool slightly But there is a range of 54.5 Which would be around here to 61 I mean if we got a 61 print that would put us all the way back up here to around the highs Yeah, we were we were seeing in 2018 Which if you look at that that puts us at the highs really that we've seen in the last 20 years As far as the service sector is is concerned Um, as ever given we've got perils on friday keep an eye out for the employment constituent And that's one of the main figures comprised within the report the actual ISM manufacturing We had earlier in the week was a decent top-level reading export new export figures which were strong Which is all positive signs. However, the employment number was still pretty lackluster So we're interested to see how that comes out if that's lackluster and jobless claims We can see a generally stable But then if adp was weak That could mean that there's more of a downside bias towards the payroll report that might come on friday um, otherwise Speakers, um, you got andrew bailey. He's uh, he's a he's a busy chap at the moment. He's back on Um speaking again this afternoon, but he's talking about crypto Uh, so I'd say it's doubtful that he'd say anything particularly interesting on monetary policy of the economy But he is the governor so I'd keep an eye out for that ECB schnabel just given the back of the context of the ft report this morning Um, I'd keep an eye on that that's at 4 p.m. And then feds evans But a non-voter is talking about economic conditions and monetary policy at 5 30 And then finally you've got quite a bit of fixed income supply coming out of France spain and the uk if you're trading fixed income futures Uh, all right, that is it. So again, if you've made it to the end of the briefing Thank you for sticking with me. Uh, don't forget to subscribe to the channel Really appreciate all the support and engagement that we get online And then don't forget to register for the payroll event on Friday. Okay guys, have a good session ahead and take care


Item number SCP-906 Object Class Euclid Special Containment Procedures Subject is to be contained in a 3x3 m2 fully airtight, 12 cm thick titanium enclosure surrounded by acid-resistant glass. Temperature must be kept under 5°C. When temperature exceeds this limit, all personnel are to be evacuated to a distance of at least 100 m. Immediate area containing enclosure will then be locked down until temperature has been lowered. Holding cell is to be maintained on a bi-weekly basis and checked for sufficient corrosion or gaps. Any damage to holding cell is to be repaired immediately. SCP-906 is to be monitored at all times from 4 digital cameras mounted on each corner of the enclosure. Any abnormal behavior reported from these cameras will result in immediate lockdown of area around containment cell. Access to SCP-906 is permitted only to supervise Class D personnel for feeding and or enclosure maintenance. SCP-906 is to be fed 80 kg of raw meat every 42 hours. Description SCP-906 is a writhing mass of dark brown, worm-like invertebrates. These organisms seem to interact in a uniform fashion, forming a colonial superorganism in a similar manner to army ants. For reasons currently unknown, SCP-906 will usually form its body into that of a very rough humanoid figure. SCP-906 is shown to be capable of crude bipedal movement when in this state. However, when traveling longer distances, it will deviate to a flattened mass with a greater efficiency of movement. SCP-906 is capable of secreting a viscous, highly corrosive, semi-translucent fluid similar in color to its skin. This substance is shown to have an acidic strength comparable to hydrofluoric acid, but it has a less pronounced effect on titanium. No effect on acid-resistant glass, and this substance displayed the ability to destroy teeth, bones, hair, nails, clothing, jewelry, and some kinds of equipment in under an hour. SCP-906 is predatory and highly aggressive. When hungry, it will swarm over any living creature within its path and coat them in its acidic secretion, thereby breaking down the matter into a liquid slurry which it then consumes. Attempts to remove or disturb SCP-906 during its beading have proved fruitless. When a designated prey is nearby, SCP-906 will alter its form into that of a flowing carpet and move across any surface in order to pursue its target until the prey is captured. Due to the small width of SCP-906 component organisms, two centimeters wide, barriers will only slow its advance. Obstacles that cannot simply be passed will be destroyed by the acidic substance SCP-906 secretes. SCP-906 has also displayed the ability to take alternate routes to reach its prey, such as drainage pipes and ventilation shafts. Through methods currently unknown, SCP-906 appears capable of mimicking animal-like sounds and parroting human speech and was described as a raspy, hoarse voice while in its humanoid form. SCP-906 appears to use its ability to lure prey into areas that are difficult to escape, such as deep pits or maze-like corridor networks. Eyewitness reports for containment breach 906-2-10-01A detail SCP-906 taunting prospective victims and even emitting a sound something like laughter before attacking its prey. This behavior suggests a kind of rudimentary sentience, but it is unknown how a creature comprising several thousand individual organisms is able to achieve this. SCP-906 specimens, when removed from the larger body, will attempt to move back towards the central mass and have been known to dissolve through any obstacles in their way. It should be noted that individual specimens do not show the same level of navigation skills as the full superorganism. Specimens of SCP-906 have the ability to reconstruct in the multiple versions when damaged in a similar manner to common earthworms, such as splitting one SCP-906 specimen resulted in each half growing into separate organisms. Despite this, SCP-906 specimens have been destroyed via means of incineration, freezing, and full body disintegration. Should the need to destroy SCP-906 ever arise, use of flamethrowers or liquid nitrogen is permitted. However, SCP-906 specimens will split themselves and multiply over the course of several hours should the larger mass be severely reduced. If SCP-906 is ever required to be terminated, all specimens must be eliminated to prevent SCP-906 reforming. In order to keep SCP-906 in a more controllable state, the enclosure it is housed in is to be kept at a temperature below 5 degrees Celsius at all times, as this is shown to reduce the movement, reaction time, reproduction abilities, and metabolism of SCP-906. Addendum 906-05-01 Testing of SCP-906 resulted in a Class D being targeted before a cow. A second test was then conducted in this manner, wherein a pig, sheep, dog, and horse were all placed alongside a Class D. SCP-906 once again targeted the Class D first. Second targeted animal was the pig, followed by the sheep, the horse, and finally the dog. Addendum 906-05-02 In routine enclosure maintenance, SCP-906 reportedly spoke to a supervising staff member by saying his name several times. The reason it did this is unknown, and the staff member, one Dr. Anthony Richards, reports being buried disturbed by the proceedings and has expressed a desire to be kept away from SCP-906 in the future.