Coming up on DTNS, Tom thinks he might have spotted the next Google, Tom's me. How much money do small U.S. carriers need to get rid of Huawei and ZTE equipment? And Patrick Norton's here to review the high points of the big hardware announcements for me. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, September 4th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, Patrick Norton, host of AVXL is back. Good to have you, man. Good to be here. Sarah Lane has the day off. Well deserved day off. But we're going to be talking about some of the EFA stuff. We got some AI stories. And we were just talking about, you know, everybody's deal with schools and however different areas of the country are dealing with that on good day internet. If you want that and some discussions of all kinds of other good stuff, go become a member patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Gamers in Africa may experience lower lag when playing online. If their ISPs are connected to the Angola Cables Network, Angola Cable used data collected from traffic routing during the lockdowns, when there was a lot of people playing games, to develop an IT transit system that they say reduces latency or lag by 20 to 50% for gamers in Africa and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Ping was reduced between 70 and 100 milliseconds, not two, but by 70 and 100 milliseconds during a demonstration event between gamers in South America and Africa. Russian search company Yandex will spin out its self-driving unit from MLUBV, which is a joint venture with Uber. After that spin out, Uber will own 19% with Yandex and its subsidiaries having the rest. Self-driving car unit currently has a testing fleet of 130 vehicles spread across Russia, Israel, and the United States. Speaking of Uber, Uber announced it will add an Uber Rent option to its mobile app in the UK. Users will be able to make a booking just before picking up the vehicle, although Uber is actually encouraging them to make a reservation at least 24 hours in advance. Uber has trialed similar services in Australia and France. Japan's antitrust regulator will take a closer look at Apple's App Store policies for any potential violations. Bloomberg sources say several Japanese game studios have expressed concern not so much about the 30% cut, but about the App Store including inconsistent enforcement guidelines, unpredictable content decision, and lapses in communication. That seems to be the thing, yeah. That seems to be the thing you definitely hear everyone agree on, even if they are not upset about the 30% cut. And a couple of ETH announcements from Huawei. The Honor Magic Book 14 and 15 laptops were announced. They'll have AMD's Ryzen 5 4500U CPUs inside. Magic Book 14 out September 21, starting at 749 euros and 99 cents. And the Magic Book 15 in October for 699 euros, 99 cents. The 16-inch MacBook Pro, sorry, that's what they want you to say. Magic Book Pro has AMD's Ryzen 5 4600H CPU. That one's coming September 7 for 899 euros, 99. And Huawei announced two Honor branded smartwatches. The ruggedized Watch GS Pro is said to meet US mill standard 810G procurement standards for withstanding extreme temps, humidity, rain, sand, and pressure. I doubt the US military will be buying any of them, but it meets the standard. It also offers a root back mode that'll either use GPS or GLONASS to help you retrace your steps if you're out hiking around. So it's kind of meant for outdoorsy stuff. Battery life is 100 hours in workout mode or 48 hours with GPS. That one's available September 7 for 249 euros, 99. And the more stylish typical Honor Watch ES has a 10-day battery life. Kind of a fitness tracker thing. Ship in September 7 for a mere 99 euros, 99 cents. All right, let's talk a little bit about a Facebook disclosure policy. Facebook has had a disclosure policy. Well, they've had a disclosure system, let's say, for a while, but they never codified the policy. Now they have got an official policy on third-party vulnerability disclosure. Under the new policy, Facebook says that when its researchers find critical bugs or security vulnerabilities in third-party software, this isn't dog-fooding. That's a whole different thing. This is we were using software in making Facebook and running Facebook, and we found a vulnerability. Facebook will give developers 21 days to respond and 90 days to fix the issues. Pretty standard. Company says it will make good faith efforts to report the bugs appropriately to third parties, but reserves the right to disclose sooner if a vulnerability is being actively exploited or even delay beyond the 90 days if everyone agrees there needs to be more time to fix it. Facebook says it will also disclose its own patched vulnerabilities, and in fact, in pursuant of that, the company published details on six WhatsApp vulnerabilities. None of those showed evidence of being exploited, and all of those have been fixed. And WhatsApp now has a little dedicated area for this if they disclose any vulnerabilities in the future. But Patrick, I don't know about you. This strikes me as a pretty standard vulnerability disclosure plan. People seem to be generally pleased with it. I keep playing like, wow, this seems enormously normal. I wonder if they'll actually live up to the simple and fairly low bar they've set for themselves. Well, yeah. I mean, because it's Facebook, you think advertising, but this isn't the advertising side. This is the security researcher side of Facebook.  And I'm so burnt out on Facebook saying things and then forgetting what they said in terms of policy. I guess the reason I brought up that it's a different wing is that Facebook is more than one person. So hopefully you're right. This group is like, no, no, we're security researchers. We follow the norms of the industry. And this is a good example. This is a good precedent for that, to say like, oh, no, you're security. Third-party vulnerability policy looks pretty good, pretty standard. And all of the folks that I've read reacting to it, they may have a quibble here or a quibble there in minor stuff. But Facebook has a bug bounty program that's fairly unremarkable or uncontroversial. So hopefully... I would like to apologize to the entire Facebook security community for any offense that might have taken... I'll just leave it there. Until later when they screw it up. No, they're not going to screw it up. We believe in you. All right, a report from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission estimates the cost of removing Huawei and ZTE equipment from small telecommunications networks in the U.S. will be $1.8 billion. In other words, to be able to figure out how to rip that all out and replace it, $1.8 billion. Now, about $1.6 billion of that would qualify for federal reimbursement if the U.S. Congress appropriates the funds, which they have not yet done. The report only covers carriers that receive universal service funds provided to subsidized coverage in underserved areas. So the real overall cost in the U.S. of ripping out Huawei and ZTE equipment is likely larger. In a related write-up, at least it seems related to me, Wired Steven Levy has a great interview with Qualcomm's founder, Irwin Jacobs, that sheds light on the rise of Huawei and ZTE. Jacobs notes that Qualcomm could have been like Huawei, where they were making chips and making handsets and making other equipment. But wanted to get carriers to adopt CDMA as a standard. And back then in the 90s, getting the carriers saw a handset maker as a competitor. So Qualcomm backed out of making handsets. They had only ever made them in, guess where, Asia. They thought other U.S. companies would kind of pick up the baton, but Motorola and others didn't. They left that business leaving Qualcomm's chipsets, which were still available for sale, because that was what they built their business on, as an easy way for Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE to fill the gap. Huawei and ZTE also, Jacobs points out, benefited from the Chinese government funding their research and development, something that U.S. companies did not get from the U.S. government. Do you think, does the $1.6 billion, $1.8 billion, does that seem kind of low for un-knitting this, or is that just because it's so restricted? Yeah, it does until you think about like, oh, this is only USF, right? This is the FCC saying, okay, the people who would qualify for reimbursement qualify because we give them money to build out. So we'll give them money to replace, and it's only those folks who qualify. And you're also talking about small carriers. Folks who live in big cities, probably don't even run into these carriers, but they're usually in rural areas. Sometimes they're in other underserved areas. You know, like poor areas, stuff like that. But they're small. That's kind of the point. The ATTs and the Verizon's, they have their own capital budgets and they're not trying to, well, they may be trying, but I don't think they're gonna get any money for this. You're laughing because I said they would be trying. And I'm like, yeah, but that's not really the point here. This is... I'm trying not to oversaturate DTNS with Snark, so I was trying to pull myself back from the abyss there. But yeah, so I thought that was interesting, too. Just the idea that that's a lot of money to spend, to rip out equipment that may have an issue. There's a lot of suspicion. There's not a lot of hard evidence that there's an issue, but some people feel the suspicion is all you need. And that's a couple of billion dollars that has to be spent in order to get it out. It's been interesting to watch that whole, is there proof, is there not proof, different agencies say they've seen proof, but it all remains very, very thin. We never got the follow-up on the Bloomberg Business Week story, did we? That's the only time anybody said they had found evidence, and everyone denied it, except for Bloomberg Business Week. So that was... I haven't forgotten, folks, still waiting to see if Business Week will ever clarify that story. They haven't yet, as far as I know. We talked with Andrew Main back in July about OpenAI's GPT-3 and what it can do to produce natural-sounding text. You remember Andrew had created a system for mimicking the voice of historical figures or anybody, including myself, that you could find text from. One problem with GPT-3, though, is while it can sound convincingly human, it isn't good at accuracy. Technology Review has a write-up about a company called DiffBot. Pay attention to this company. DiffBot, right now, takes text and creates a series of three-part factoids. That relate one thing to another. So, for example, if they looked at your bio, they would say, Patrick Norton is a writer. You know, subject, verb, object. Patrick Norton lives in St. Louis. Those factoids are all connected in a giant knowledge graph, and DiffBot's knowledge graph is huge. DiffBot, Google, and Microsoft are the only three U.S. companies that crawl the entire public web. They don't target it. They crawl everything. DiffBot uses some neurolinguistic processing, then, to extract factoids from the entire public web, and then adds them to its knowledge graph. It rebuilds its graph every four to five days, adding, they say, on average, 100 to 150 million new entities each month and use machine learning to create new connections and get rid of out-of-date ones. So, it's constantly trying to stay up-to-date. DiffBot's knowledge graph is available free to researchers, but it also has 400 paying customers, and those paying customers you may have heard of. Duck, duck, go, for instance. Snapchat, NASDAQ, all pay for access to this knowledge graph. In fact, Adidas and Nike use it particularly to search for counterfeit shoes, because you can go search for Adidas and Nike, but if you want to say, look, I just want to find the people that are actually selling shoes, DiffBot is good at that. It can say, okay, we'll return only the people who are actually trying to sell your shoes, and it even maybe give you a tip-off on which ones are legit and which ones are. DiffBot CEO, Mike Tong, says he plans to create a natural language interface to DiffBot. Right now you have to do some coding if you want to access it, but if you had that natural language interface, he wants to create a universal factoid question answering system where you could ask it any question, and it would not only answer accurately, but cite its sources. The reference librarian of the internet. And OpenAI's GPT-3 might play a part in creating that front end, because DiffBot isn't good at the natural language part, and OpenAI GPT-3 is. This struck me as, I'm not saying it is the next Google, but if there were to be the next Google, this is how I would kind of see it playing out, which is we're not going to be advertising-based, so we don't have that part. We make our money else-wise, and we can create a system that will just answer your question accurately without giving you a bunch of spam. I can think of nothing that would make me happier. I'm also kind of like, because you said there was, you know, the scale of the amount of, you know, search they're doing is so huge, and they've had $13 million in funding. They have 16 members according to CrunchBase, and they actually have a business model, which I think suggests an entire law on sort of the scale of venture capital investment versus practical nature of companies that I'm not qualified to make. Certainly, I'm sure. And these folks came out of Stanford, so, you know, very similar story of like smart folks at Stanford, figured out a new algorithm and then built a business on it, right? Sounds familiar, yeah. It's pretty impressive.  It's fine. I'm not guaranteeing anything here, but I definitely think this is something to keep an eye on. If you want to be able to later say, oh yeah, I heard about DiffBot way back in 2020. Tom Merritt told me about it on DTS. Please subscribe. Google Magenta is a Google AI project that makes AI-based tools to help the creative process. So you may have heard them. They can help you compose melodies or help you draw cats, because every AI thing has to start with cats somewhere. Now, Google Magenta has a tool to help you make lo-fi vibes to calm you down during stressful times. This was a project spearheaded by an intern, Vibrat Tio. He created a lo-fi player which lets you interact with objects in a web-based eight-bit room. So it's got eight-bit graphics, looks kind of retro, and you mix your own soundtrack. Now, Tio used human-made baselines, drum beats, et cetera. He also wrote four melody options. That was the bass. But then machine learning kicks in and riffs off those melodies. So every time you log in, you get a different one, right? It's taking the melody that was human-made and changing it somehow. And then the fun of it is you can just sort of click around in there and add in a baseline, change the beats per minute. And there's a couple of cool things in here where you, like, click on the TV in the room and the machine can interpolate between, say, the chill and the dense melody. You can click on a guitar on the wall and you can add that. You can add a baseline, but click it on the bass, click on the piano, add a piano. There's also a YouTube channel where you can type commands in chat to change the music along with the rest of the room. It's a fun demo toy, but it's an interesting example of being able to take the sort of machine learning stuff that's out there and create something with humans involved. It's also incredibly compelling. You like the one I got here? I'm going to add a drum. Let's see what happens. Thank you for holding. Oh! Your call is very important to us. I don't know what you think about this. I mean, it's just a fun tool for machine learning or is there anything more to it? I think anything, in one, I'm a sucker for anything that allows me to tap four times and create an entirely different melody or beat or track. I actually want to go to the YouTube channel and start experimenting with the commands you can type in. Yeah, there's a limit on what it can do, so you can't really mess with it too much. I think that's why it was safe to put into a YouTube channel like that. But yeah, if you're into a little lo-fi music, you can click on the cat and change the background sound from rain to a beach or change the cat to a dog and then you get cityscape sounds. No, no, it's kind of fun. Go check it out magenta.github.io slash lo-fi-player or we'll have it in the show notes at dailytechnewshow.com. Hey, folks, if you want to... I'm just going to use this. If you want to get all the tech headlines each day at about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, we've touched on a lot of hardware announcements out of IFA in Berlin this week. And now that we've had a few days to kind of digest them all, Patrick, help us break down some of the important takeaways. I feel like the biggest stories this week were sort of IFA-adjacent rather or IFA-timed rather than actually at IFA. Absolutely, yeah. I think the biggest one for me was of course the 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs. Well, I'll be honest with you, it's a toss-up between Nvidia's announcement of the 3000 series GPUs and the 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs. But I'll start with Intel because this announcement makes me feel like Intel isn't quite on its back foot and gasping for breath as much as it's felt with the processor announcements through this year. AMD was the first to PCI Express 4 on the desktop, Intel beat them to laptops. Early benchmarks for these processors are kind of hopeful. We have not seen any real-world benchmarks at this point. It updated 10 nanometer Superfin transistor technology which is basically saying more better process is bringing higher frequencies which is helping with performance. You know, there's like 50 or so laptops from the Nova Dell, Acer, MSI, several others that are going to be hitting between now and the holidays. I really want to see what the battery life looks like because they're talking about like a 20% improvement or sort of a 20, not a 20% improvement in battery life but that there is some significant, well, progress, I'll say in power consumption in various parts. And if I try to get any deeper than that, I'll get it wrong. But the EVO certification I think is really interesting. It's demanding nine plus hours of real-world battery life, fast charging as in 30 minutes of charging to get four hours of use out of the laptop, if you've ever wanted to charge a laptop in between stops on flights on a plane or if you're constantly running around that's a big deal. Wi-Fi 6, which I don't, Wi-Fi 6 I think is less compelling than we thought it would be. It's more future-proofing at this point than anything really, yeah. Yeah, the real-world improvements I don't think are really showing up a lot for home or small business networks. It's early yet. NVIDIA, again, technically wasn't an EFA but everyone I know that's a gamer with any kind of money is freaking out over the 3070, 3080 and 3090.  Everybody's freaking out about the 3090, I know.  It is essentially a, it's essentially a Titan, right? They're just calling it a 3090. Some people have said the 3070 or the 3080s and 3070. I don't want to kind of get into a lot of the product positioning. I just, as I said to a friend of mine yesterday, I'm like, whatever you buy, there will be several more models sometime next year that will be delivering more performance for the same prices now or the same performance now for less money because NVIDIA especially always seems to fit every single price point in the stack. And they develop more and more cards. It's a little maddening actually when you start looking at sort of all the different options you have available. But there are so many CUDA cores available, especially in the 3090, like in excess of 10,000, which is an insane number. And everybody that reviews GPUs was kind of like, oh, they did that thing where they make the new GPUs sound amazing with really weird benchmark chart decisions. But fundamentally, these should be vastly, they should deliver vast improvements in performance, especially on RTX, we hope. Again, they haven't given anyone any cards to test. So they're kind of doing a thing that NVIDIA does, which is announcing the cards, getting as many people to buy them as possible. And then we'll see what the performance is. I think they worked really hard after, I think RTX was kind of underwhelming in real use. So they were trying to make some really serious efforts at the 3000 series. They've kind of sat on this for a long time. And they want to make sure the 3000 series... This feels like when ray tracing is finally worth having in there, right? Like they hadn't do it earlier to play the groundwork and this feels like the time it'll maybe pay off. Yeah. I mean, as you put it in one of the notes in the script, watch the GeForce RTX 3080 get medieval on an RTX 2080 TI and Doom Eternal. That was PC World's headline, not mine. I'm so sorry. My apologies, PC World. You know, this is also for the first time in years, actually, which I'd bought a larger power supply for my main desktop box one, because power supplies are still kind of erratic in terms of the ability to buy a decent high quality power supply right now. But the 3080 is looking for 320 Watts. The 3090 is like 350 Watts. The 3070 is a mere 220 Watts. You know, by the way, rumors are already hitting. We're actually Tweak Town, I should say, is reporting that supplies will be incredibly thin on these cards until next year. Just because people want them, is that why? I'll say go to Tweak Town to learn more. I think it's fair to drive the traffic their direction. But that's also kind of a classic situation with almost any GPU launch in recent memory. There's also been some interesting things where the 2000 series cards have mostly vaporized from the channel. And there's also some sort of coin mining activity that is particularly compelling to use GPUs for that is starting to drive GPU demands again. Man, I thought they'd all move to A6. A6 are no longer as, according to a friend who is deep in the mining lifestyle, he had actually got rid of, he had actually disassembled all of his systems with their umpteen GPUs per box. Because A6, he couldn't pee with A6 and now the algorithm seems to have switched in a way that makes the GPUs much more competitive for mining or profitable at this point. Qualcomm had a bunch of announcements that I think were kind of interesting to look at because kind of extending on that story earlier where they were like, well, we were doing this but we made this decision and now Qualcomm's kind of like, okay, we need lots and lots of revenue because it's that time of the year again, everybody wants revenue. The next Snapdragon 4 is essentially going to bring 5G to inexpensive phones to the mass market. The Snapdragon 8CX Gen 2.5G, which is ARM for Windows laptops and they're claiming better than 10th core i5 performance for like half the watts. So if a Core i5 is pulling 14 watts, they're claiming they deliver comparable performance at seven watts. The other part they talked about was their adaptive noise cancellation for true wireless earbuds. A lot of ear buds, a lot of wireless earbuds or true wireless earbuds are using Qualcomm chips as part of the device. My beloved Cambridge Audio Melomania or one of the first I knew of that actually used it. The performance is excellent and this is bringing some really slick Apple AirPod prograde active noise cancellation. So with the idea is that they will, as your earbuds shift around in your ears or maybe contact changes, they will actually adapt the noise cancellation but they will probably do it for a lot less money. And I think it's interesting to watch all of these developments on Qualcomm and Qualcomm kind of moving away from just being like, we make phones because of course there are so many competitors. Apple of course has their own in-house processing but to see them kind of really trying to create a Windows ARM processor that can really pound on Intel is an interesting move for them to make. Very curious to see real-world performance. Yeah, finally let's finish with thoughts on just the broader question of IFA having some in-person but really it was minimal. And this was the first of the huge tech conferences that was consumed majority online. It's been interesting to look at because it feels like IFA will probably be much closer. In 2021 will be much closer to a traditional IFA. They basically cut down the number of invitees. They sort of cut everything down to the bone. And at the event this year, of course we already know that CES has been canceled and it was interesting because it was this very weird moment where I got an email from IFA because I thought there might be a possibility I could attend IFA in Meet Space to use one of my favorite phrases. And IFA was basically like, you're no longer invited. You're in America, you guys have issues and keep your filthy... We're keeping it to 5,000 people tops anyway, so sorry. Thank you for your interest. Stay in America. But it's been interesting to watch because at this point it seems like they are going to be going back to their full-scale operation in 2021. We wait with bated breath where at the same time this year, CES decided to go all virtual. And it's been interesting because a lot of what people seem to be hearing is that a lot of organizations are starting to sort of like, okay, if we're going to pull away from these events, then we can start doing our own virtual events. How do we do this? Is there traction we can get? I feel like there's in a year we're either going to be kind of right back on to the sort of traditional trade shows that we're used to or that trade shows are going to be limping along and becoming a part of the past.  Well, folks, you got thoughts on that. Join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Shout out to the patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Carmine Bailey, John and Becky Johnston, and Chris Benito. Len Peralta, you always find a good angle to draw on our topics. What have you found for us today? Well, you had mentioned a word. You said a word to a minimalist about tech events. And that's my take on this. Tech events like the tech themselves are getting smaller and minimal, at least this year they are. And this is my take on that, even going with a very minimalist look of just, this isn't supposed to be Patrick, but he's someone sitting at a desk saying, these launch events are getting to be even smaller than the chips. So yeah, so this was just something very, very quick and easy and small. And I believe this one is called Everything is Getting Smaller, and it's available right now at my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len, or at my online store at lenneperaltastore.com. Patrick, does this capture the way you're feeling about these events? I'll be honest with you, for me, so much of the importance of the events is all of the things you get to do that are not specifically getting the commercial from the vendors, all the communication, all of the sort of behind the scenes conversations that go on. So I figure probably more sobbing in my case. Add some tears to that drawing. Well, if you want to see Patrick when he's not crying, where should you go? AVXL.com is a very, very good place to go. That's a podcast I host with Robert Herron. We talk about home theater and audio technology. And we're going to start talking about the joys of putting in the Atmos height speakers. Let me tell you something. You haven't realized you're running out of cable until you start installing four speakers in the ceiling. So much wire. Ceiling speakers are watching you. Go check it out. Atmos is really kind of obscene, though, in a cool way. That's AVXL, the A-V-E-X-C-E-L, like the spreadsheet, AVXL.com. Also, Paolo used the perk that we have for some patrons where they can ask us to record something for them to have us record his ways directions. So he got me, Roger, and Sarah to all record, like, in 100 kilometers, in 200 kilometers. Well, probably not kilometers. I think they were just meters. But you can now use them, too. Not only did he want to use them for himself, but he made them into ways links. So you could have Sarah telling you where to go in your car, or Roger, or me. You can find those links at patreon.com. Slash DTNS. Thank you, Paolo, for making those and letting us share them with the rest of the crowd. That was pretty awesome. That's fun. Yeah. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. Live, don't forget, holiday Monday here in the United States Labor Day, but we'll be back Tuesday with a Frenchman, Patrick Beja. Talk to you then.


A very good evening aspirants, I would like to share with you all something. See aspirants, the most difficult part in our entire UPSC preparation is the consolidation of the preparation material. As a one-stop solution to this problem, the Shankar IAS Academy has come up with an app. Yes, you all heard it rightly. It is an app available in the Google Play Store freely. It is the Shankar IAS Academy app. See the features available in the app are very much useful for your UPSC preparation. Say for example, you can use the current of a materials available in it. You can use the Hindu news analysis videos available in it. Also the top of testimonies are available in it. Not only this, you can even make the admission to the Shankar IAS Academy through the app. So aspirants do not waste time. Just go into the Play Store, install it freely and utilize all the highlighted features available in the app. So with this good news, we are going to start our today's Hindu news analysis for the date 6th of March 2022. Displayed here are the list of news articles that I have chosen for today's discussion. See friends, today our discussion is going to be really useful for both your problems as well as mains. So kindly pay attention and utilize all the key points given in the discussion for both your problems as well as mains. See based on the economic topic that I assure you, today I have chosen the National Pension Scheme and the Atal Pension Eugenia. See kindly make use of it. This is an important in both problems as well as mains. Now without wasting much time, let's get into the discussion. Have a look at this news article. See this news article talks about concerns expressed by the World Health Organization's chief scientist over the malnutrition and growing anemia levels. Yesterday, while addressing an international conference of Nutrition Society of India, she expressed these concerns. Apart from this, she also mentioned that there is a need to educate people on well-balanced traditional diets. So this is the crux of the news article given here. Now just have a look at this UPSC Prelims question from the year 2017 and the mains question from the year 2013 GS Paper 3. From looking at both the questions, you can understand that this topic covering malnutrition and anemia is very much important for both your problems as well as mains. So in this context, let us quickly go through what is anemia, then what is malnutrition, what are all its causes, and what are all the risks and diseases that are caused by them. And we should also see some of the initiatives taken by the government of India to address these healthcare issues. Before getting into the discussion, the syllabus relevant to the news article is given here for your reference. Just go through it. First, let us start our discussion with what is anemia and its causes. See anemia is a condition in which the number of red blood cells or the hemoglobin concentration in our body is lower than the normal. As you know, hemoglobin is needed to carry oxygen and if you have too few or abnormal red blood cells or not enough hemoglobin, then there will be decreased capacity of the blood to carry oxygen to the body's tissues. So ultimately, this will result in symptoms like fatigue, weakness, dizziness, and shortness of breath. Now you may ask how much hemoglobin do a person actually need. See the optimal hemoglobin concentration needed to meet physiologic needs varies by age, sex, elevation of residents, smoking habits, and pregnancy status. See the normal hemoglobin level is measured in grams per deciliter of blood. Now let us see the normal hemoglobin level. For women it will be 12.1 to 15.1 gram per deciliter. For men it is 13.8 to 17.2 gram per deciliter and for children it is 11 to 16 gram per deciliter. See in specific for pregnant women it is 11 to 15.1 gram per deciliter. Okay. Now talking about the cause, the most common cause of anemia include nutritional deficiencies, particularly iron deficiency, though deficiency in folate, vitamin B12, and A are also important causes. See note that hemoglobinopathies and infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and parasitic infections can also cause anemia. Now talking about its treatment, see while iron deficiency anemia is the most common form and is relatively easy to treat through dietary changes. And for other forms of anemia it requires specific health interventions. Okay. Now let's see the impacts created by them. See anemia is a serious global public health problem that particularly affects young children and pregnant women. See you can see from the WHO estimate that 42% of children less than 5 years of age and 40% of pregnant women worldwide are anemic. Remember as per WHO anemia is an indicator of both poor nutrition and poor health. It is problematic on its own but it can also impact other global nutritional concerns such as stunting, fasting, low birth weight and childhood overweight and even obesity which is due to lack of energy to exercise. Not only this, if you take the school performance in children and the work productivity in adults even that is reduced due to anemia. See this can have further social and economic impacts for the individual and the family. Some of the other effects of anemia are given here in the image. Just have a look at it. Talking about the initiatives started by the government, see India has a long history of various government run problems like integrated child development schemes, national nutritional anemia control program, weekly iron and folic acid supplementation, then national iron plus initiative etc etc to combat anemia. See there is an important initiative called the Anemia Mukt Bharat. The Anemia Mukt Bharat focuses on reducing anemia amongst pregnant women that is from 50% in the year 2016 to 32% by the year 2022. See intensive focus will be given on interventions like providing prophyliotic IFA that is iron and folic acid supplementation, then deworming, then intensified year round social and behavioral change communication campaign that is SBCC campaign. Then it also focuses on ensuring delayed cot clamping in newborns especially this is beneficial for term and preterm infants because this increases the hemoglobin levels at birth and improves iron stores in the first several months of life. Then it focuses on anemia testing through digital methods and the point of care treatment. Lastly it focuses on mandatory provision of IFA fortified foods in government funded health programs and addressing non-neutrational causes of anemia in endemic pockets. See along with it there will be special focus on malaria, hemoglobinopathies and fluorosis also. For these interventions six institutional mechanisms will be focused and this is through intra ministerial coordination establishing national Anemia Mukt Bharat unit, then national center for excellence and advanced research on anemia control, then convergence with other ministries and strengthening supply chain and logistics and lastly the anemia Mukt Bharat dashboard and digital portal which is a one-stop show on anemia. Okay now let us see about the malnutrition among children. See what is this malnutrition? It refers to the deficiencies, excesses or imbalance in the person's intake of energy or nutrients. Remember the term malnutrition covers two broad groups of conditions. One is the under nutrition which includes stunting which is a low height for the age, then fasting which is the low weight for height, then the underweight which is the low weight for age and lastly it covers the micronutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies that is a lack of important vitamins and minerals. The other one is the overweight which is causing obesity and diet related non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer. So here the deficiency, excesses or imbalances in the person's intake of nutrient will lead to malnutrition. Now why is this happening? See many families cannot afford or access enough nutritious foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, meat and milk whereas foods and drinks high in fat, sugar and salt are cheaper and more readily available. This further leads to a rapid rise in the number of children and adults who are overweight and obese in poor as well as rich countries. Why? Because they go in for the intake of cheaper foods than the healthy foods. So knowing all these facts remember it is quite common to find under nutrition and overweight within the same community household or even individual. It is possible to be both overweight and micronutrient deficient as well. Now coming to the government's initiative to elevate malnutrition see the government has announced the mission portion 2.0 this is to strengthen nutritional content delivery outreach and outcomes. See it actually focuses on developing practices that nurture health wellness and immunity to diseases and malnutrition. The government has also advised the states or the union territories to ensure that the quality of supplementary nutrition satisfies the criteria of the Food Safety and Standards Act of 2006 and its regulations. Then the states and union territories have been advised to promote the use of Ayush systems like Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Homeopathy then Sova, Rekpa. See this is mainly to combat malnutrition and related disorders. Okay now apart from this a program to assist the creation of portion vaticas at the Anganwadi centers has also been launched. This is to address the dietary diversity deficit by employing traditional knowledge in nutritional practices. See this is what suggested by the WHO scientist am I right? This portion vaticas know is mainly to encourage the community members to grow local food crops in their backyards and this helps them to secure with an inexpensive regular and handy supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. Am I right? So that's all about this news article discussion. So we made a very holistic coverage of two major diseases that is anemia and malnutrition. Also we saw the steps taken by the government of India to eradicate such cruel health problems. See utilize these points to enhance your mains answers. Okay now with these key points in mind let us move on to the next news article discussion. See this article here it says that in just six weeks after the release at least three of the critical endanger Batagur Bhaskar species have traveled hundreds of kilometers and are now in Bangladesh. See according to Shailendra Singh who is the director of Turtle Survival Alliance India the animals with transmitters had traversed hundreds of kilometers and in the case of one turtle that was in Bangladesh at present the disposal had been about 400 kilometers. See according to the article the objective of the initiative which is fitting transmitters and releasing the turtles was to ascertain the habitat breeding pattern and the movement of the species. So this is the crux of the article given here. Now just have a look at this UPSC prelims question from the year 2019. You can see that turtle is being covered in some way or the other. Not only this question few more previous year questions had been asked based on turtles. So having understood the importance of this topic on turtle now let us make a discussion on turtles as well as tortoises in prelims perspective. Okay first of all let us see about the turtles. See turtles belong to one of the oldest reptile groups in the world. Their origin dates back to the time of dinosaurs which is nearly 200 million years back. See this makes them significantly older than snakes, crocodiles and alligators. Turtles are aquatic or terrestrial reptiles of the order Testudines. See when you take most of their body is shielded by a special bony or cartilaginous shell developed from their ribs. See the order not Testudines includes both extent and extinct species. Extend here means living okay. See about 300 species are alive today and some species of turtles are highly endangered and now let us see few important characteristics of turtles. See generally turtles can be herbivores, carnivores and omnivores in nature. Secondly turtles breathe air and lay their eggs on land which makes them amniots. See even though they spend most of their lives under water they still lay their eggs on land. Note that most of the sea creatures are an amniots which means they lay their eggs under water. Now the third characteristic is the shell of a turtle. See this is actually a part of its skeleton. The shell makes up a part of the turtles rib cage and spine. The shell of a turtle actually grows with its age just like a human skeleton. Okay now coming to the next characteristic turtles are cold bledded which results to an incredibly long lifespan and another reason for the long lifespan is that they have very slow metabolism and can survive without food and water for a long time. They can also survive in harsh conditions which also adds to their lifespan. Now let us see one of the interesting character of the turtle. See turtles are known for their amazing ability to return to the exact beach where they were born years later. Like many animals know turtles can navigate their way at sea by sensing the individual lines of magnetic field but they can also remember the magnetic signature of coastlines and sense tiny variations in magnetic field allowing them to guide themselves back to their home. See most of the turtle species are endangered. This is because of constant human interruptions in their natural habitat. See they are also poached by humans and are pushed into illegal pet trade. Now having seen about the turtles and its characteristics now let us move on to the next part of the discussion. See there are many types of turtles. It includes sea turtles, leatherback turtles, snapping turtles, pond turtles, soft shell turtles and of course tortoises. Oh yes the tortoises how can you forget them? Have you heard the classic statement which is not all turtles are tortoises but all tortoises are turtles. See don't worry we will decode this now. See tortoises are a type of turtle. One of the most distinct difference between turtles and tortoises is their habitat. See turtles are aquatic creatures and they spend most of their time in water whereas tortoises are land dwelling animals. This difference in habitat itself creates some physical differences between these shelled creatures.  This helps them walk across the terrain and they have strong forelegs that they use for digging. On the other hand most turtles know will have webbed feet. This helps them to swim and move in water. Now taking the next difference which is about their shells. See the shells of the tortoises are usually rounded and dome shaped whereas if you take the turtles they have flatter more streamlined shells which helps them swim more efficiently. Okay now let us see some of the turtle species in India. The freshwater turtles include Indian flap shell turtle, Indian roofed turtle, red crowned roofed turtle and the sea turtles include olive ridley, leatherback sea turtle, green sea turtle, hawksbill sea turtle and the tortoises include Indian star tortoise and the asian forest tortoise. So with this we have come to the end of the discussion. See don't worry regarding the conservation I have made it as a question and in that we will discuss about the conservation. So with these key points in mind let us move on to the next article discussion. Take a look at this news article. It is about the Samajwathi party's promise about the restoration of the old pension scheme as a pole plank in 2022. So this is the essence of the article given here. See we are not going to discuss about the article here. Instead we will learn some facts about the national pension scheme and the Atal pension eugenia. Okay first of all let us see about the national pension scheme. See the national pension scheme is a government sponsored pension scheme. It was launched in January 2004 for the government employees. Remember initially this NPS was introduced for the new government recruits but except armed forces. But from 1st May 2009 this NPS has been provided for all the citizens of the country. This is including the unorganized sector workers but on voluntary basis. Okay the scheme is open to people between the age 18 to 60 years. So this is a pension come investment scheme launched by government of India to provide old age security to the citizens of India. It brings an attractive long term saving avenue to effectively plan the retirement through safe and regulated market based return. See the scheme is regulated by the pension fund regulatory development authority and this PFRDA established the national pension system trust and this trust is the registered owner of all assets under NPS. Okay see the national pension system or NPS is based on unique permanent retirement account number which is otherwise called PRA or PRAN. Okay this is allotted to every subscriber. See in order to increase savings the government of India has made the scheme reassuring from security point of view and has offered some attractive benefits for the account holders. Okay now let us see some of those benefits. Firstly it is regulated. See NPS is regulated by PFRDA which ensures transparent norms governing the activities. NPS created trust ensures adherence to the guidelines through regular monitoring. Secondly the scheme is voluntary. See it is a voluntary scheme for all citizens of India. You can invest any amount in your NPS account and at any time. But a subscriber is required to make initial contribution which is minimum of rupees 500 for tier 1 and a minimum of rupees 1000 for a year for tier 2. This is at the time of registration. Okay if you want to know more about tier 1 and tier 2 accounts just watch our Hindu news analysis dated on January 10 2022. Okay the third benefit will be flexibility. See the subscribers have the flexibility to select or change the POP which is nothing but the point of presence. Also they can change the investment pattern and fund manager. Okay see this ensures that one can optimize returns as per their comfort with various asset. Fourthly it is economical. See the NPS is one of the lowest cost investment products available. And the fifth benefit is portability. This NPS account or the plan will remind same irrespective of change in employment city or state. Okay and finally the tax benefits. NPS offers triple tax benefits to the subscribers. And that's all about this national pension scheme or NPS. Now let us see about the Atal pension Eogena. See the Atal pension Eogena or APY is a pension scheme launched by the government of India. It is focused on the unorganized sector workers. Under the APY minimum guaranteed pension of rupees 1000 or 2000 or 3000 or 4000 or 5000 per month will start after attaining the age of 60 years. And this is depending on the contributions by the subscribers for the chosen pension amount. See the minimum age of joining APY or the Atal pension Eogena is 18 years and the maximum age is 40 years. Okay and when we take the age of exit and start of pension it would be 60 years. Therefore minimum period of contribution by the subscriber under APY would be 20 years or more. And the Atal pension Eogena or APY is open to all bank account holders who are not members of any statutory social security scheme. See any individual who is eligible to receive benefits under the APY will have to furnish proof of possession of other number or undergo enrollment under other authentication. See an APY subscriber will have to get the other number recorded in his or her APY pension account and also in his or her savings account where the periodic pension contribution installments are debited government contribution is to be credited. Okay see the contributions to the Atal pension Eogena is eligible for tax benefits similar to the national pension scheme and with this we have come to the end of the discussion. See these points can be utilized for enriching your mains answers which is related to the pension schemes or the old age security benefits for the citizens of India. Also if prelims questions comes under any of these schemes or Eogena you can easily arrive at the answer. Okay so with these key points in mind now let us move on to the next article discussion. Now look at this news article here it says that Pakistan is still on the FATF's gray list for terrorism financing and note that it urged Islamabad to address the remaining flaws in its banking system as soon as possible. Here you have to note that Pakistan has been on the financial action task force gray list since June 2018 this is for failing to monitor money laundering which leads to terror financing and it has been assigned a plan of action to complete by October 2019. Since then the country continues to be on that list due to its failure to comply with the FATF mandates. So this is the story behind the news article given here in this context let us briefly understand about FATF in prelims perspective. See the financial action task force on money laundering that is FATF was founded by the G7 summit in Paris in 1989. This is in response to the growing concerns about the money laundering. See after recognizing the threat to the banking system and financial institutions the G7 heads of state or government and the president of the european commissions formed the the task force. This task force includes representatives from the G7 the european commission and the eight other countries. Now let us see the responsibility of this action task force. Firstly they need to examine money laundering techniques and trends secondly they have to review the action which had already been taken at a national or international level and lastly they have to set out the measures that still needed to be taken to combat money laundering. So to sum up FATF is the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog. This intergovernmental body sets international standards that aim to prevent illegal activities because they cause harm to the society. As a policy making body it aims to build the political will needed to implement national legislative and regulatory reforms in this area. Okay see more than 200 countries and jurisdictions committed to implementing them. So FATF is there they are putting rules and regulations but what if the countries don't comply. So to identify the non-compliant countries FATF has maintained the FATF blacklist or the call for action countries and also it has FATF gray list or the other monitored jurisdiction since 2000. Now what is this blacklist and gray list? Let us see now. The FATF blacklist is the agency's official list of non-cooperative countries or territories. See the organization considers these to be non-cooperative in the global battle against money laundering and terrorism financing. Okay now coming to the FATF gray list it is the agency's official list of countries and jurisdictions that are identified as having strategic deficiencies in their regimes to counter money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing. See understand the difference between the two here the blacklisted countries are non-cooperative unlike the blacklisted ones the gray list countries actively work with the FATF to address strategic deficiencies in their regimes. Okay see when the FATF places a jurisdiction under increased monitoring it means the country has committed to resolving swiftly the identified strategic deficiencies within agreed time frames. Also it is subject to increased monitoring. Okay remember these countries are mandated to periodically report on the progress made in addressing the identified strategic deficiencies. Meanwhile the FATF closely monitors the implementation of their agreed upon action plans and in a timely and cost-effective manner. Okay so that's all about this article I hope you would have understood what is FATF blacklist and gray list and what is the responsibility of this financial action task force. So with these three points in mind now let us move on to the next article discussion. Now look at this article here it is a science-based article and it talks about the discovery of black hole closest to earth at a distance of thousand light years. See it was discovered by european southern observatory in the year 2020 but now a belgium-based group is saying that it is not a black hole and they are saying that it is a vampire which is a two-star system in a rare short-lived stage. So this is the crux of the news article given here. See we are not going to go deep into the issue here because the exam demands us to know general science. Now before getting into the discussion look at this preliminary question from 2019 this is about the black holes that we are going to discuss today. By looking at this question you can very well understand that this kind of science topic like black hole is very important for preliminary examination. So using this as an opportunity let us study some facts about black hole. First of all what is this black hole? What will be your first guess after hearing the name? This is some kind of hole or did you think about empty space? See don't get confused with the name.  I'll draw an even more clear picture for you. Think of a star ten times more massive than the sun which is squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of a new-rock city. The result of this is a gravitational field so strong that nothing not even light can escape. So black holes are volumes of space where gravity is extreme enough to prevent the escape of even the fastest moving particles. Okay now let me tell you another fascinating fact because no light can escape black holes are invisible however space telescopes with special instruments can help find black holes. They can observe the behavior of material and stars that are very close to black holes.  It's generally accepted that stars with the mass at least three times greater than that of our sun can undergo extreme gravitational collapse. This happens once they fuel depletes. See with so much mass in a confined volume the collective force of gravity overcomes a rule that usually keeps the building blocks of atoms from occupying the same space.   See black holes do not wander around the universe randomly swallowing worlds. They follow the laws of gravity just like other objects in space. The orbit of a black hole would have to be very close to the solar system if it want to affect the earth. See this is not likely occurring. So don't worry we are safe on earth. And if a black hole with the same mass as the sun where to replace the sun earth would not fall in. See the black hole know with the same mass as the sun would keep the same gravity as the sun. So the planets would still orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now. Now let us see some of the findings about the black hole. See Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes in the year 1916 with his general theory of relativity. The term black hole was coined many years later in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler. After decades of black holes being known only as theoretical objects the first physical black hole ever discovered was spotted in the year 1971. Then in the year 2019 the event horizon telescope collaboration released the first image ever recorded of a black hole. See the event horizon telescope saw the black hole in the center of a galaxy M87 while the telescope was examining the event horizon. The image maps the sudden laws of photons. It also opened up a whole new area of research in the black holes.  Now in the year 2020 the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Roger Penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity. So that's all about this news article. As I said this topic is important in prelims perspective. So with these key points in mind now let us move on to the next part of our discussion which is the prelims practice question discussion. Now look at this first question. It is about the national pension scheme. It is a two statement question so I have to go through both the statements before arriving at the answer. See the first statement is incorrect because we saw in a discussion that the national pension scheme is a government sponsored pension scheme and it was launched in January 2004 for government employees. Initially it was introduced for the new government recruits except armed forces but from 1st May 2009 NPS has been provided for all the citizens of the country including the unorganized sectors on voluntary basis. So here the first statement which says the eligible persons for the NPS are the members of the unorganized sector only is incorrect. Okay now look at the second statement see it is saying that it is open to people between age 18 to 40 years. It is also incorrect because this statement is a feature of the hotel pension eugenia. Then what is the age limit for the national pension scheme? Yes you're right it is 18 to 60 years. So your answer here will be option D neither one nor two are correct statements okay. Now moving on to the second question operation save kurma is related to which of the following species. Option A tiger B pangolin C turtles and tortoises D elephants. See the answer for this question is option C turtles and tortoises. Now we'll see about this operation save kurma. See considering the commercial exploitation of the turtles and tortoises as well as the extent of involvement of the illegal wildlife traders in the illegal trade of life specimens the wildlife crime control bureau envisaged a species specific operation which is named as operation save kurma. This is mainly to focus on the major states involved in the poaching transportation and illegal trade of live turtles and tortoises. See adding to this as I said in my discussion now let us see the conservation efforts in India regarding the turtles okay. Firstly let us see the laws see there are eight laws which are providing for the conservation of turtles which are the wildlife protection act ratification of the sites then ratification of bond convention then environmental protection act then the biological diversity act wildlife protection amendment act of 2002 then the coastal regulations or notification lastly the state fisheries policies and laws all these laws of India are protecting the turtles okay. Now what are all the other conservation efforts firstly take the turtle survival alliance India. See it is dedicated towards conserving non-marine chelonians, crocodilians and cetaceans. See they function as a field program of the wildlife conservation society India through five field based projects this is across the country mainly in the Ganges and Brahmapudra river system okay and we'll see one more conservation effort see the wildlife protection society of India launched operation Kachappa this was in September 1998 the main objective is to reduce turtle mortality and try to safeguard the future of the species by concentrating on three main activities what are they firstly to improve patrolling of non-fishing zones and the protection of nesting sites secondly to support legal action on turtle conservation and fishing law violations and lastly it is to build public support and awareness of sea turtle conservation issues see that's all about the conservation efforts taken for turtle in India now let us move on to the third question it is regarding the black holes see this is also a two statement question so I have to go through both statements to arrive at the answers the first statement is wrong because we saw in a discussion that black holes are not empty region instead they are a great amount of matter packed into a very small area now look at the second statement it is correct because black holes are volumes of space where gravity is extreme and this is enough to prevent the escape of even the fastest moving particles okay now look at the question here it is demanding for correct statement so your answer here will be option B two only is the correct statement okay now look at the last question see this is framed based on our FATF that is financial action task force discussion we saw in a discussion that G7 has helped in launching the financial action task force now coming on to the question which of the following countries are members of G7 here the answer will be option B USA Canada Japan now let us see what are all the seven countries which are the members of G7 they are USA UK Canada Japan Germany France and Italy today I have a quiz question for you please go through the question and post your answers in the common section I will post the correct answer within 24 hours okay now displayed here is a mains practice question for you please go through the question and write your answers and post it in the common section if you like this video do like share and comment and don't forget to subscribe to the Shankar IS Academy's YouTube channel thank you for listening


Okay very good morning to you Friday the 1st of May and welcome to the briefing a few things I just wanted to mention quickly before I begin the normal session One is if you're watching this and you're not subscribed to the channel I'd really appreciate it if you would just hit that subscribe button and you'll get the morning briefing updates every morning There's also when you get a moment some other interesting videos that you might enjoy as well in the Insight series and other playlists So do like and subscribe and the other thing is for those who are not aware of this program We do lots of Intense and now online given the COVID situation more one-to-one and small group training but we also have an e-learning portal which is more on demand and I did just update this yesterday, so I'm kind of showing it again but this is a kind of a rolling subscription service that we have and It's a accredited level for professional qualification So it does include if I scroll down a course where we go into Again, this is all video driven delivered predominantly by myself and the head of trading peers and we go into everything you need to know in order to Understand the market to analyze it better and ultimately to trade it better particularly from a fundamental global macro point of view so economics 101 different asset classes we drill into What you know what makes them move what is the underlying reasoning behind you know different Asset classes technical analysis risk management and so on But the other cool thing about this is that we do add is a lot of people say on the daily briefings. They they miss Sam So he is alive and he is well So he is COVID free for the moment touch wood But he does put in his daily trade setups onto the platform here So he puts in his his kind of still technical take on the day and he does that every evening ready for the next day ahead So that's obviously super useful And then I do what we call these macro now bite-sized sessions about certain topics that might be in focus So for example yesterday, here's I can what a lesson would look like on the more rolling content Two videos here how to trade the ECB event and I'll go through and I talk about the pre-statement Preparation the pre-press conference preparation crib sheets kind of hyperlinks to interesting research and so on So yeah, check that out if you if you get a moment the link for those who do want to take a look in a bit more detail I'll put into the description of this video, but let's get going Let's talk about markets and let's see what's going on this morning and equity index futures a little heavy Don't forget it is labor day across mainland Europe and what does that mean? It means markets are closed So no trade in the DAX the bund More common products there that I know you guys look at The UK is open as per normal The reason for that is it would normally be the same a bank holiday the early May Day Bank holiday today But because of the VE day 75th anniversary that is on the 8th. So next Friday. That's when They had already shifted the public holiday in the UK to that day in order to have an extended celebrations to for VE day So that's next Friday. You're gonna have to hold on for for another week if you based in the UK But that does have a meaningful impact there in terms of the overall volume is likely to be seen today And as I'm going to discuss I can run you through some of the news headlines And there's certainly a few things to catch up on from some aftermarket earnings Last night, which is kind of dampened the sentiment a little bit and what otherwise was a pretty phenomenal equity performance In the US indices throughout the month of April. So we'll also have a look at that as well But yeah, as I said, Apple and Amazon the two kind of tech giants coming out and disappointing from a kind of a top level the The first Amazon they warned of a possible second-quarter loss while Apple omitted from basically issuing their earnings Forecasts for the first time in more than a decade and we'll look at those numbers more shortly But as you can see the S&P on the right Down about 50 at the moment the NASDAQ down just over 200 the Dow I've swapped here where I'd normally have the DAX is down about 380 Otherwise though interestingly The equity move I do think you need to put into context And let's just have a quick look at that before we really drill down into those corporate earnings Into a little bit more detail. And here's here's the context I guess of the price action that we have seen over the last week or so and You know, we're back to quite a key level and and actually, you know It's quite incredible if you were to X out the oil negative shock that we had Back on the 2021st of April and then if you were to X out the earnings the Fed meeting and the Gilead information that we've had We are basically net zero We were training around 2850. We're now training at 2850. So despite seeing Quite a large degree of fluctuation, of course I mean this range here from the 21st to the high that we've printed, you know, that is nearly 10% that move Which is quite incredible But here we are back at quite a key technical point. You can see that support level That had held some of the price action through the 28th and the overnight session going into the 29th We just broken through there now So just getting a little heavy as Europe has come into market probably just digesting those corporate earnings from yesterday You can see here. I've marked up the Amazon Apple earnings created an aftermarket downward move Obviously a little bit more pronounced in the Nasdaq but dropping gapping down running down to those loads Which you've just retested and broken through and it looks like we've just gone through the respective S1 here Just now as well in the future. So if we continue to to push down, obviously I've already got these these levels kind of marked up from from yesterday The previous high that we had here would be a target on the 27th At the opening dip that we had on the open of Wall Street kind of coinciding around that spike as well We had them 26th in the overnight trade So that would come in at 28 43 and 3 quarters anything below that then 35 would be in the next area I'd look at and that was the high that we had on the run of a price activity shortly after the open on the 23rd So that's the kind of equity story. I mean one thing is look at it on a on a broader perspective This is what it looks like here on a daily continuation And despite obviously the kind of negative set of equity space this morning We are in fact or have done have seen the S&P 500 surge Almost 13% for the best mark month since 1987 Granted it does come after March was down 12 and a half percent So, you know, the harder they fall the faster they rise in that respect But yeah, quite incredible and obviously backstopping a lot of this has been This recovery the slowdown in coronavirus infections lots of countries now talking about their plans to Loosen those measures or at least the pathway to reopening the economy gradually. We've had massive stimulus initiatives Inaction by by central banks and governments, of course We've had some pretty pretty decent large cat earnings as well despite those two names I've just mentioned alphabet Microsoft Facebook all were positive in terms of their share price reaction helping Gilead Sciences with their experimental covert 19 Therapy potentially being a bit of a breakthrough And all of these have been positive catalysts and so a little bit just pull a pull off going into a month Then probably isn't too surprising And on that notion of month end, I did want to just point out a couple things just taking a look at the euro here and You know, let me just remove some of these ellipses where we were just looking at that range yesterday and If you were to tell me like why is the euro dollar popped like that Yeah, if you weren't looking at the chart in terms of the the time at the bottom You'd probably say well what the ECB must have said something well Actually the ECB was happening here and So this wasn't an ECB related move and it was quite interesting because you know with our guides on the advanced Professional program we're going through our training. We have basically a morning call and end of day review when we're all we all jump on zoom we basically discussed the day review trades as a group discussion and This was going into four o'clock and this move was going into four o'clock, you know, this particular very extreme candle here and just explaining that idea about obviously four o'clock is a very meaningful time in the FX markets because it's the London fix and Generally, then what you you tend to see is a little bit of a potentially erratic Movement and yesterday, of course as we had heard throughout the week there was a lot of month-end models flagging dollars selling into month-end and Certainly that became very pronounced at that period of time and you saw quite a coordinated move there where all dollar related Pairs were seeing a similar type of pop. You can see that evident as well in cable and around a similar time frame. So Definitely You know the FX fix Obviously fully read in the FT even week or two ago is being Investigated about some unusual suspect activity that was happening specifically in the euro dollar currency in the moments up to the fix and That does happen from time to time But also it almost gets exacerbated when you have let's say a month-end a quarter-end Situation from a seasonal perspective But then also as well you're going into a European holiday as well on Friday and so I think it was just a matter of that in combination with some technical breaches as well that just helped Promote that kind of movement. You can see here as well that kind of range higher that we had in Euro through the course of really the last couple of sessions just breaking as well just helping some of them momentum there Otherwise elsewhere the other interesting charts here from a overall Longer-term perspective. I say longer medium term gold despite the equity move that we've had You know, we have come off and we're down this morning, but you know, I've seen the context of things We're still heavily up over the course of the last couple of weeks And so gold continues to kind of fade a little Just looking here on a on a 120 candlestick. We're we've just broken through Technically that low that we were printing on the 21st. That was an error that held some of the price action up On the 20th and you can see has been an area as well in focus over the period of late March and early April The move down here to the s1 probably worth keeping an eye on today around that area of 1673 75 in the futures does encapsulate some of the the closing of the candlestick lows that we were seeing on the 21st and that also was a support area on the 9th 8th and 9th and also resistance back on the 26th and 29th of March So quite sure to see how gold's going to react today. Actually if we were to break through those levels obviously I'd target down at the Spike low that we had back on the 21st that comes in at 66, but I don't see any much reason why we wouldn't Very rapidly get down to 56 if we were to get break through These these near term levels here of support be on that point And quite close proximity to that s2. You've got 54, which was those previous highs You can see there on the 6th. I'd also be monitoring So it's gonna be quite interesting there And again, don't forget Europe out of the markets of generally speaking volumes can be low And as much as that can lead to perhaps more range browned More technically led sessions than You know to definitely within the lack of real calendar events today as well It can also exacerbate conditions if liquidity generally is more thin So definitely more toward the US session probably I'll be keeping an eye on that and then the oil market We just continuing to bounce here. I mean, it's just phenomenal really I mean if you think about it, that doesn't look much on the chart, albeit it looks fairly You know strong in terms of the the bid tone. I mean if I'm just having a look here I'd probably be keeping an eye on just generally The price activity now as we continue to move higher in that kind of channel But if you think about this from a percentage point of view And if we go from the low that we printed this week, you know, it's only a couple of days ago to where we got to the high That was yesterday, you know, we're up hundred and four percent in oil It's just it's just unreal But obviously the percentages somewhat warped by the fact that you know, we're trading at these such low levels But you know here This is going to mark then the first positive week that we've had In what otherwise has been a really tough months for oil and again Helping accelerate the upside has been some touted book squaring into month And we've also had some tentative signs of the cutting of production really starting to kick in those OPEC Cuts officially do start as of today as well first of May So oil up about 50 cents. So again one thing when I look at the the setup generally for this morning The news that is in play is Relatively old and by that I mean it's earnings that came out last night And so at the moment you've got equities a little softer, but gold is also down oil is up T-notes flat and the Dixie Is not really doing a great deal I mean, it's flat that essentially and that's reflected in the major currency pairs So for me when I you know come in fresh to late and I'm thinking at the news I'm looking at the charts technically you can see technically a couple of interesting things I'm looking at fundamentally. I would say I am absolutely neutral about this morning. I have no preconceived idea about how I think today is going to play out And I think that is an important point for any new traders, you know It's absolutely fine to be in that situation for me then I don't really Want to do anything not unless I see a And unexpected fundamental capitalistic or B You start to see and what I think will probably play out today a lot more of a technically led session and Then definitely with a US twist given the fact that most of mainland Europe is out the market so a degree of conservatism probably Warranted for this morning and then maybe look for any opportunity later when the US come in because really there's not a Great deal on the docket today quick run through them some of the headlines just to wrap up We have had a few different things From Apple and Amazon will kick off with Apple then they reported quarterly revenues that were 13 or Grew excuse me 1% but they didn't provide a forecast for the first time in more than a decade It's quite unbelievable really how Apple can get away with this They kind of went through that period of the last 12 months where they started to stop reporting on their unit sales for their iPhone for example, because they wanted to kind of Withdraw investors focus away from that And so they could try and attempt to improve their kind of product mix with services and applications rather than just the The physical phone which has always been the dominant Generator of the company's revenue but now they've said they're not going to Provide a forecast and quite unusual as it says it's the first time many years that's happened Tim Cook In the commentary where he spoke over the earnings or post He said it was there was some very depressed period in late March and early April But they saw a pickup in the second half of the month The company has raised its dividend They've expanded their share buyback plan by 50 billion dollars in late January Don't forget those we were looking at Q1 in late January The company was also affected by what was going on in China So don't forget the very depressed period they've had in late March and early April That was really when the global pandemic kicked in But apple if you think about it has many of its asian-based suppliers and manufacturers that were grounded to a halt And that was part of the efforts obviously in mainland china to Control contain and delay the outbreak of the virus and that also resulted in shipping delays for devices and supply constraints So apple have had a really tough quarter in that respect But that you know unless there's a massive stock market route more broadly on a Potential second wave in the second quarter on the virus, you know, I wouldn't probably expect then The company to have a much better Um Well, there's I guess less Risk of a kind of repeat of that happening albeit they've got a they've got to navigate the stormy waters of the economic reality Of the fact that obviously mass unemployment in america for example Um, but yeah, interested to see obviously they're getting their shops reopened as well quite key for for the consumer to have that touch and feel before making these large purchases It's going to be quite important for them as well going forward So their shares were down about three percent after market yesterday And then the other company of course is amazon now amazon Their profit shrank they said it may incur a loss in the current quarters It boosted its spending in order to keep logistics running smoothly during this pandemic Um, cover the stats here the coronavirus effort included spending on personal protective equipment enhanced cleaning of warehouses And stores operational changes to promote social distancing Um, they did go on a hiring binge Basically in the run up to this in mid-march knowing the lockdown is coming There was a temporary two dollar an hour hazard pay Raise for its hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers. So when multiplied like that It is the second largest private employer in america Behind I think Walmart So that cost them an extra seven hundred million dollars as well just to facilitate that even though it's only two dollars an hour per person um, so Yeah, the company It's just they're basically operating expenses is what is what's hurt them although they've Managed to have an okay performance if you actually check out what that operating Um, expenses look like here's the operating income in black as you can see going back to second quarter 2017 And then it's looking at their forecast range here in blue for q2 of 2020 So, yeah, I mean for for for me and I'm sure for you amazon has been an absolute lifesaver during this this lockdown Uh, but that comes at the costs for the company The one thing I would say though much more long term, of course when we've when we've got over this Pandemic situation in the next six 12 months I do think though that The world has changed You know talking quite top level I think that you know It's been quite liberating for a lot of companies to see that working from home is actually a viable alternative In terms of productivity I think a lot of companies traditionally very nervous of that outside of say the tech world In that sense And I do think that consumers behavior has changed a lot, you know out of necessity people using let's say amazon services And they have been in my opinion very dependable in terms of whether you know household goods as well as other services as well then Is this going to help promote and accelerate the long term trend in favor Of what amazon is best positioned for which is online shopping away from those traditional brick and mortar Companies which already have been suffering as amazon has become such a phenomenal success story Over recent years. So yeah, definitely remain Quite Positive for the company specifically given the situation and that they're in And how their position for the long term So yeah, some hard times now their shares were down fairly heavy actually About five percent in aftermarket trade and and that's why we did have to sell off that you can see In the overnight session from what's dampened then the the open for this morning In terms of in the in the equity market more broadly for us index futures As europe have come in Canada for today. What have we got? As I said, it's really quiet There's obviously nothing coming out of europe for the holiday for the uk mortgage lending and approvals But this sort of stuff's not really going to move the pound Looking at the manufacturing pmi final reading for the uk coming out nine nine thirty You've then got the us equivalent coming out this afternoon again These are all final readings with the u.s. Manufacturing pmi at three p.m. London time expected to be depressed But like all the other figures that we've seen I think people are kind of over You know the kind of the the the low ball figures that we're seeing I think can be quite easily digested by the market without too much of a of a fear at this point Baker Hughes rig count the operational rig count is is interesting at the moment because that's a key component for how quickly Naturally North american production is going to be decreasing and this coming amid all those other cuts that have been planned now from that OPEC plus agreements are worth keeping an eye on that and then from an earnings perspective You have got in chronological order some of the more Larger market cap names. You've got honeywell international at 11 30 You then got a Colgate palm olive that they're coming at just ahead of midday london Exxon mobile 12 30 and chevron at 1 30 are probably two oil majors to keep Keep on your radar How are exxon chevron going to perform? Well, I mean it's been a tumultuous time in the oil market, of course and Question mark there is is that you know oil prices move in real time and as to the company's share prices And so how much of that is already reflected in the share price? You know these negative numbers or loss of potential profit and uncertainty about the future probably a lot of it You know you saw that in BP who rallied despite their bad numbers a few days ago Both have already suspended their initial 2020 guidance in the wake of covid so Yeah, I don't think it's going to be a great deal of a shock to be to be quite honest But just as i'm talking I can see equity markets just having another little look on the downside. So the s&p Again, my kind of view here is just looking to just follow the existing trends really in the market unless something else changes So here is the s&p comes down Looking a bit more heavy. There you go. There's the test on that level And this is the way I think the day is really going to play out And if we just sit here now, this is the european push and reaction to some of the news overnight Perhaps this level holds we wait till the us come in We are in may now. So whether or not it kind of Unleashes the shackles a little bit off of the idea of that book square and going into month end If we were to move lower down as I said, I'd be keeping an eye on that 28 35 level And you move beyond that point and a deeper move You've got the s2 and then 28 12 and three quarters would be the low on the 24th I'd be watching. All right. That is it guys. So Have a good session ahead Have a great weekend I think the weather's going to be a bit better. So hopefully you can get out for some exercise or or your daily walk And I wish you all the best. All right guys. Take care