Yeah, this is joint work between CWI and Google, myself, Ailey Burstein, Pierre Carpman, Angel Battini, and Jarek Merkhoff. And this represents a work, well, building upon already research going back two decades. But this particular piece of work lasted two years. We worked for tears on this. And so SHA-1 is a cryptographic hash function. So it's going to take an arbitrary length input, and it's going to compute a bit string of 160 bits. And SHA-1 was designed to be collision resistant, although even we don't have a formal definition of collision resistant, there is this informal definition that it should be infeasible to find different x and y that map to the same output. And of course, you have the birthday search. So there is a generic attack cost with complexity about to the power 80. And now the two most widely deployed cryptographic hash functions were MD5 and SHA-1 the past two decades. And both have been broken initially by a team led by Professor Ketoumi Wang at all. And MD5 has been broken practically. There was immediately the work collisions. And SHA-1 was broken theoretically. And it really took 12 years to finally find the first collision. Luckily, we still have two, at least two, secure cryptographic hash function standards, SHA-2 and SHA-3, that we can now all migrate to. So that collisions are a problem in real world, has been already shown quite strongly in two instances. Namely 2009, when we created a rogue certification authority using an MD5 so-called chosen prefix collision attack, where we created a collision between a website certificate, a very just normal one, and a rogue certificate. And we basically got an actual CA signature on our website certificate just by requesting normal process, an automatic process. And we got our signature. And because of the collision property, this signature was now also valid for a rogue CA certificate, thereby suddenly making this a valid CA certificate. And then, of course, you can generate on-the-fly certificates for any secure website that you can do a live virtually undetectable man in the middle attack. The other instance is in 2012, when there was the super malware flame targeting in the Middle East. And it actually turned out that it used a fake signature for Windows updates. And again, this was using an MD5 chosen prefix collision attack. And actually, instead of targeting the PKI branch of Microsoft that actually signs Windows updates, it actually attacked an almost unknown branch that just automatically handed out certificates on the internet if you knew how to ask. And there they created a collision between two certificates where this was actually a code signing certificate and any Windows update signed by that would be accepted by any version of Windows at that time. This, of course, been fixed now. And of course, once you've created these fake updates, they actually spread them basically on a local network using a special Windows protocol that you can push updates. And then you basically have an infection where you basically can do nothing against. So this represents the state of the art on MD5 and SHA-1 crypt analysis. So we have the identical prefix column and the chosen prefix, which is a more stronger type of attack. And the current state of attack is that we're basically, for MD5, we can very quickly generate collisions in a fraction of a second. Chosen prefix collisions are a bit harder. It takes about a day. We finally managed to get a SHA-1 collision that's to the power of 63 on GPU, which is actually relatively speaking more costly than on CPU, so it's slightly higher. And well, chosen prefix collisions are about to the power of 77. Well, to also view this sort of in light from what's practical, you should also think about the Bitcoin network that does SHA-2 operations. And on a yearly basis, the Bitcoin network does 2 to the power 86 SHA-2 operations. So they already says that basically, well, 80-bit security is not enough. So all these attacks on SHA-1, they really attack the SHA-1 compression function. The underlying function that just processes a 512-bit message block and updates the internal 160-bit chaining value. Well, it would really do this until the entire message plus some padding is processed, and then the final chaining value will, of course, be the hash. And this pretty much operates like a block cipher. It will linearly expand the input message block, so 512-bits, partitioned as 16 words of 32-bits, and it will expand them to 80 words of 32-bits. And then there will be a nonlinear mixing of the five-word states, basically in 80 rounds, where in every round there's one piece of message used. And then finally, there's a Davis-Mayer feed forward to really prevent that the function is efficiently invertible. Now, for collision attacks, we're basically applying differential copter analysis. So we're going to consider two different instances of the compression function, side by side, one for each of the messages. And we're going to analyze the differences. So in particular, we're going to use a differential path, which is a precise description of all the differences how they propagate through the compression function. And the most important part of the differential path is basically last 60 steps, because they really determine most of the attack's complexity. We want that part to have the highest success probability possible and basically as far as possible. And then once we have this differential pass, what we can do, we can just translate it into a system of equations, and then we can try to solve this to find the actual M&M prime that will be part of our collision. Now, how to design these determinants, these differential paths? Well, Chabot and Jue already showed in 98 that basically the way to go for 0 and shall 1 is a disturbance vector. And this disturbance vector basically is a vector where every one bit marks the start of a local collision. And a local collision, well, at that step, at that bit position, a single bit difference will be introduced, and it will directly be canceled in the next five steps. And basically because it has many one bits, it basically shows which combination of local collisions you have to use. And the disturbance vector is an expanded message itself. So it conforms to the linear message expansion of shall 1. And that's why it's actually the unknown feasible way that's actually compatible with the message expansion. So a lot of people have looked at it, analyzed it, which disturbance vectors are actually the best ones for attacks. And Stephen Manuel actually showed that basically all these disturbance vectors that people have looked at fall in two classes that are just shifts and rotates of each other. So we can now easily focus on analyzing these two classes. And each disturbance vector basically determines the shore difference in a message. And also, like I said, this single base state bit difference determines these positions. But there's still a variant in design and carry. So the disturbance vector pretty much already lays the groundwork for the differential path, that already dictates many of the differences. You still can just pick sign and how many carries you want. So we're going to use the same approach as introduced by Wang. We're going to use two near collision attacks, right? Where the first near collision attack is going to introduce a difference into the chaining value. And that will then be present at the start of the second block. And then for the main part, we'll actually use the opposing differences. So we'll end up with a negative difference here. And then the Davies Meyer forward will cancel them both. And we have a collision. Well, the benefit of this approach is that we don't have any additional requirement on the disturbance vector that there should be zero difference here. And then we basically have, we can get better differential paths with higher success probability. But that does mean that here in this part, that doesn't really follow disturbance vector, we have to manually connect them. Well, Wang and I did this completely by hand. But now, of course, we have actual algorithms that can compute these so-called nonlinear differential paths to connect the chaining value input to the main differential path. So OK, yeah, we have our differential path can translate it to a system of equations. And actually, this is a system of equations that's only on one compression function, which makes it very convenient. We don't have to compute things on two compression functions at the same time. And the system of equations, when it's fulfilled, basically guarantees that when we apply the input differences, that the differential path will be exactly followed. And these system of equations actually just consist of very simple equation on message bits, involving at most two message bits, and very simple equations on state bits. Again, involving at most two bits. And then, of course, we're going to need to solve them. Well, actually, the first 60 steps are very easily solved. So in the first 60 steps, we have the entire message block still as freedom. And we can just actually choose the value of the message block that it immediately satisfies all state equations. And actually, we can also fulfill all message bit equations, because these are linear message bit equations. Over bits, they are linearly derived from the input message block. So we can just map all these equations to just the first 60 steps. And these can also be easily solved. But yeah, after the first 60 steps, we don't have any degrees of freedom anymore. So now, actually, the remaining 64 steps are completely determined. But of course, we can still do smart changes that don't break any of the equations up to some point. And thereby, we can cheaply generate partial solutions up to some point. And basically, amortizing the cost of earlier steps. And it still offers quite significant control over about 30% of the steps of Xiaowan. And then, of course, for the remaining part, we just have to generate many, many, many solutions. So in this case, up to step 24, to just probabilistically fulfill the remaining steps. And that's why you see the success probability of this part is crucial to the complexity. So this is the overview of the whole procedure in creating such a new collision attack. Well, of course, we first are going to have to build a system of equations. We're going to analyze the disturbance vector, look at optimal differential path for the main part. We have to construct the connecting parts between the chaining value and the main differential path. Then we're going to translate it all into attack conditions. And actually, to speed up the attack, we want to find additional conditions because we allow actually multiple differential paths. And so we can actually find additional conditions that use both message and state bits. And this will give us a slight speed up using the early abort strategy. This is an additional step that we needed for the second near collision attack because the first steps of the differential path were so heavily overdefined. Just by trying different variants nonlinear path, we couldn't get around the solvability problem. And we, in the end, resulted to sadly just find a drop-in replacement of the first few steps of the differential path. And of course, the next step is, well, we have the system of equations that, apparently, is now solvable. And now we actually have to find a solution as fast as possible. Of course, we have to analyze the smart changes that we can do. They are called boomerangs and neutral bits. And now we're going to, of course, have to write the attack algorithm. And in this case, the attack algorithm for the first 60 steps and all the tables, all the constants, they're just completely automatically generated. That's very convenient. But then the part where most of the attack complexity is has to be hand-optimized and also hand-implemented. And especially for the GPU, that has to be done completely by hand. And then, of course, just running the attack since it's such a large-scale operation is also not trivial. Well, hereafter, I just want to highlight the three techniques, main techniques that we used, namely joint local collision analysis, that basically, these are the techniques that allowed us to find this collision. And GLCA, basically, really maximized the success probability we have for the main differential path, so really minimizing the complexity. I want to talk about GPU search because instead of a very expensive search on CPU, it was now much more cost-efficient with a very significant gap. And, of course, I'll also talk briefly about just this new part, this set. So GLCA, we introduced that in 2013 at Eurocrypt. And instead of just analyzing one differential path or actually looking at the one optimal differential path, we're going to compute optimal differentials over the last 60 steps. And the differential is actually an input-output tuple where the probability of that tuple is just computed as a sum over all possible differential paths that have this input and output difference. So we're really using the benefit of all possible variations instead of just one single differential path. And this technique can efficiently compute this for SHA1. And it does so iteratively, right? So it computes a set of different or possible differential paths over just zero steps, then use that to compute it over one step, then over two steps, and so on, until we've found the set that we want, and we can just immediately determine these differentials. And to do so, it wants to start at a trivial set of zero difference, so that's why we split the analysis in independent step intervals. So there's this step interval 33 up to 53 and 53 up to 61, where there's completely a zero difference in the state. So we start with a zero difference in state and we end with a zero difference in the state. And then it's actually very convenient. We can look at these tuples of input and output difference. Well, they have to have this zero difference, so the only thing are the message difference used to get there. And of course, we're just going to select all these message difference that have the maximum probability. So this immediately guarantees we have the highest success probability. And then the next step is, well, then we can also just derive the minimum amount of equations that we need to ensure that we get this highest probability. For the last few steps, we know that the starting difference is zero, but at the end, we do have a non-zero difference, of course. That's what we relaxed with a two-block approach. So now we're going to actually look at all highest probability output difference and message difference. And then we're actually going to select all message differences that have the largest number of output difference. This basically allows us a factor six speed up for the first nucleation block, because there we don't care about which output difference we get initially. But for the second block, we're just, of course, forced to use the negative difference, the negative difference of the first block. And again, we can translate this to a minimum linear amount of linear equations so we get, again, both the highest success probability and the fewest conditions that allow this. Although the first few steps are slightly different, because that's where the speed ups happen. And actually there, we want a fixed differential path up to step 23 so that we actually get fixed state conditions that we can use for earlier board strategy and also to check the boomerangs. So we're going to slightly tweak this statement. So instead of just taking the probability of all possible differential paths, we're actually going to set a fixed part, and we're going to take the maximum over these fixed differential paths over the differential. And this really allows us to, even with fixed differential paths, to maximize the success probability and, again, get all these conditions that we want. So the next part, so after we found this system of equations, well, at least for the second near collision attack, you ran into this problem where the differential paths is just enormously over the pint. Well, of course, the first five words are just directly determined by the chaining value. But then in the words output in the next five steps, well, we only have 15 free statements, so 15 degrees of freedom. But besides these state equations, we still also have message equations that aren't listed here, and we have 23 of them. So it is directly over the pint, and we don't really expect there is any solution at all. And we tried various techniques to just try many variant differential paths, basically with different signing, different conditions, to try to find something that's solvable, and that really took too long, and we didn't manage to get around this. So finally, we decided to just try to encode it as a SAT problem, right? So we created insets, equations over two compression functions, we forced the input chaining values, we forced the conditions of the differential path around step eight, and we forced the linear message equations over those first eight steps, and we just asked, said, well, just give me a variant differential path that just fits this place, that I can just put in directly in as a drop in replacement path. And this just solved the problem in one hour, so this also shows that this can now be efficiently solved, so we don't need any degrees of freedom from the first near collision block, we don't need any conditions, however complicated, on the output chaining values of the first near collision block, so that's very convenient. So the reason why we finally really managed to work is of course we ran it on GPUs, which are much more cost efficient, right? So a GPU that we, for instance, that we looked at, GTX970, has 1600 cores versus now regular CPUs, well, I think they're now coming CPUs with 20 cores, but still, this is as many more, but there is of course one trick, you have to avoid branching to make efficient use of them because 32 cores in the GPU are linked together, if they want to execute the same instruction, they're going to do it at the same time, if they want to execute different instructions, then these are going to be serialized, so if there are 32 different instructions, then it's going to take 32 cycles to execute them, so you really have to avoid branching to make efficient use of them. Well, the problem is, our collision search isn't just a World Shall One computation, it's a depth-first research, right? So at a certain step, we're going to explore all degrees of freedom, we're going to check if the conditions are met, and if so, we're going to go forward, if we exhausted our freedoms, we have to backtrack. So this doesn't seem to be naturally compatible with GPU, but still we have a very efficient framework for GPU that did allow efficient computation, we just changed the model of how we worked the problem. So actually what we're going to do is we're going to store partial solutions up to step in shared buffers, all right? So this stores all partial solutions up to step 26, and then we can just have every thread of a warp, so 32 threads would just take, each would take a solution from here, they would execute the same code to extend this to solutions of 26. So every core would try all degree of freedom and then store the partial solution. And now actually the only branching that's happening is whether or not to store an extended solution into the buffer instead of just skipping to entire different parts of the program. And of course to really enforce depth-first research, we have to enforce that they always first try to look at the last buffer that has enough work. So if we're going to compare this GPU with CPU, well the original work where this is our attack is based on from NeuroCrypt 2013 has a theoretical estimate of 2 to the power of 61. And if you consider that one CPU core does about 2 to the power of 34 SHA-1 operations per hour, then well you end up with an estimate of 15,000 core years. Whereas if you look at the GDX cards, if you look at raw SHA-1 operations, it's actually 2 to the power of 42.3. That means it would only take 50 GPU years, significantly less, at about the same cost, right? So one CPU core and one GPU, they're roughly of about the same cost. But unfortunately of course our collision attack as already showed is more complex than just raw SHA-1. So how big a factor are we going to lose relatively to the CPU? Well this was already analyzed in previous work implementing the free start collision attacks for SHA-1 and there they showed well in the collision search we basically get comparable performance of 2 to the power of 41.1 instead of this factor. And taking this with this figure it basically takes 112 core GPU years. So if you translate this, then actually the theoretical estimate on CPU translate to this theoretical estimate on GPU, right? So we lose a factor of 2 of efficiency but to actually gain a practical cost efficiency for the overall attack. So this whole attack was run on Google infrastructure which is a very large heterogeneous cluster, distributed over the world of different CPUs and GPUs. One of the problem is that it was completely proprietary, both a compile and job system that no knowledge of and could not get knowledge of. So there was basically we wrote the source code and we handed it to Google and there was this blind adaption phase blind for us because we didn't know what they were actually using and what the constraints were blind from the other direction because while we wrote it for ourselves there were very few comments and documentation of the source code. But we still with just some email contact we really managed to overcome certain problems. One problem was for instance that in CUDA for GPU development framework that we used we used managed variables which really convenience moves variables between CPU memory and GPU memory automatically. Well apparently in the code Google's compile system this completely works and compiles fine that if you actually execute it it doesn't support managed at all but you don't see any error so you just have this feature that seems to work that actually doesn't. So trying to figure that out was also time consuming. So of course our attack consisted of two sub attacks the first new collision attack. Actually we did this on CPU because we already had the source code lying about so we didn't wait for the development time to build the GPU attacks and this was run over well 100,000 CPU cores over the course of several weeks and actually we executed this twice because at the time we didn't have this set step that would really efficiently solve this over defined problem and we wanted to have some degree of freedom and so this is now completely unnecessary anymore. And then the second new collision attack which theoretically is six times as hard is like the bulk of the computation was run on various NVIDIA Tesla cards and this basically translates well to this 114 K20 core years or 71 K80 core years which actually has more GPU cores. And well this is quite a big number but yeah Google has really a lot of GPUs and running on at least 3000 GPUs and actually just the majority of the computation just ran in eight calendar days which really shows that well it was two years work but most of it was development time, right? The majority of computation was just on eight calendar days really show how practical SHA-1 collisions are now. So yeah this is our collision, 128 bytes too and of course actually what we wanted to do is we're not just create a random collision we wanted to create something meaningful and actually reusable. The SHA-1 collision is very expensive so we want something that can be reused. So we have one collision which is just a prefix of a PDF file and you can create implement full PDF files that have distinct embedding PDFs. And the way it works is basically well we have this PDF header and JPEG header we started JPEG comments and then here in this orange part we have the SHA-1 collision and there is a difference here and so this length of the comment field is different from this length and so the JPEG parser will skip over the comments and we'll start the processing image one in this case and in this case it will jump to this first part and it will be another JPEG comment of a certain length basically skipping over image one and this JPEG parser will actually parse image two and of course the collision is here so you can plug in whatever image one and image two you want and you can actually do this yourself so this is a link for somebody who created a script for you to just do this forever for any PDF files that you want. I mean we didn't really expect it to break something but we did break something namely subversion repositories because they were using SHA-1 for file de-deplication but they were using MD5 to check if everything was sent correctly and basically putting a SHA-1 collision in there it just broke the repository because it could never get anything sane out of it anymore that actually validated with MD5. So of course we had some more impact Git actually started moving away from SHA-1 and actually Google Drive and Gmail now actively checked for SHA-1 collisions and also Git and GitHub at the end of my talk so briefly want to show SHA-1 collision detection that's a real-time detection for SHA-1 collisions just a single message so you don't need to both messages and it's now actually also this was used in Git and GitHub by default in Gmail, Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive so that's very nice right so real-time protection against these SHA-1 collision attacks so yeah I basically want to end my talk here and are there any questions?


Week three of the 2021 season kicks off with the Carolina Panthers visiting the Houston Texans on Thursday night football. Carolina has a new identity on defense that has led them to a 2-0 start. The Texans are looking to play tough for a third straight week but we'll have to do so with rookie Davis Mills at quarterback. According to the polls that we took on Instagram 87% of you believe that the Panthers are going to beat the Houston Texans. Our pick we're taking the Panthers as well by 13. Sunday is filled with plenty of divisional games including the Tennessee Titans first of the Indianapolis Colts. The Titans leaned on King Henry last week to upset the Seahawks. For the Colts it's been a rough 0-2 start to the season and potentially could be without their starting quarterback. According to the polls that we took on Instagram the Titans are favored to win 78% as opposed to the Colts only 22% favoring them. We take the Titans winning by 4. One of these teams will pick up their first win and the other will find themselves in an even bigger hole. The Atlanta Falcons versus the New York Giants. Both teams for a hot second were able to keep their games last week close but ultimately find themselves a win list thus far. A shootout could be brewing in East Rutherford. According to the polls 60% of you believe that the New York Giants will win while 40% are favoring the Falcons. We're going to roll with a 40% and say that the Falcons win by a field goal. After suffering close and heartbreaking losses last week the Chiefs and the Chargers will face each other in this AFC West matchup. Travis Kelsey has a touchdown in six consecutive regular season games but it might come down to which team can run more effectively as both run defenses have struggled. According to the polls you guys favor the Chiefs to win 83% versus 17% favor the Chargers. Huge favorite we're going with the Chiefs to win by 10. We could see more defense than we expect in this game. The Cincinnati Bengals versus the Pittsburgh Steelers. Both offenses are struggling early in this season. The Bengals pass attack isn't meeting expectations while Ben Rothesberger is dealing with a pectoral injury. Taking a look at the polls 65% of you favor the favorites and the Pittsburgh Steelers while 35% are going with the Bengals. We're going to lean in on the Steelers to win by 6. Is this the beginning of a new era in Chicago? Justin Fields leads the Bears into Cleveland to take on the Browns. Cleveland had a little bit of a scare last week but ultimately we're able to beat the Texans. For the Bears they're hoping that Fields can provide that spark that this offense desperately needs. In looking at the polls you guys are favoring the Browns 75% while a fourth of you are going to take the Chicago Bears. We're going to lean in on the Browns winning this but we think this is going to be a close one so the Browns only win by three.  The Baltimore Ravens versus the Detroit Lions. The Ravens are coming off a big win against the Chiefs while the Lions offense has held up on its own the last couple of games. And looking at the polls it's not even close 95% of you favor the Ravens while only 5% of you maybe Detroit Lions fans favoring the Lions. We're going to take the Ravens to win this by a big margin. Win by 20. We head over to Foxborough as the Saints visit the New England Patriots. It's been an up and down season thus far for the Saints. Blowing at the Packers in week one but losing big time against the Panthers last week. The Patriots offense is still looking to get things going but there's no question that the defense is one of the best in the league. Looking at the polls you guys are favoring the Saints to win. 65% 35% are favoring the Patriots. We're gonna go against the Grain here and pick the Patriots to win in a close one by two. He's playing at an MVP level Kyler Murray and the Arizona Cardinals versus the Jacksonville Jaguars. No question that the Cardinals offense is one of the best in the league. On the other hand Trevor Lawrence is not doing well as many expected to start off the season. Looking at the polls 89% of you are favoring the 2-0 Cardinals while 11% of you have faith in the 0-2 Jags. We're taking the Cardinals in this to win by a big margin. 24 points. The legend of Taylor Heineke continues. The Washington football team travels to Orchard Park to take on the Buffalo Bills. The tale of a great defense versus a great offense. Washington's defense has struggled at times and same goes for Buffalo's offense. Which one will come out on top? Looking at the polls 82% are favoring the Bills while Washington is favored to win by 18% of you. We're taking the Bills but we think it's gonna be kind of close. So the Bills by 8. Not the best start for the promising rookie but Zach Wilson and the New York Jets are looking to turn things around against the undefeated Denver Broncos. Teddy Bridgewater has completed 77% of his passes thus far this season. As for Wilson he's looking to put his four interception game from last week behind him. Looking at the polls 86% of the viewers favor the Broncos to win. 14% favor the Jets. We're taking the Broncos to win by multiple possessions. Win by 17. Never thought we would say that the Las Vegas Raiders are undefeated. They host the Miami Dolphins. Tooltec of Iloa will miss this game due to fractured ribs. An already huge blow to an offense that has struggled. It won't get any easier against a much improved Raiders defense led by Casey Hayward and Max Crosby. Looking at the polls you guys agree the Raiders versus the Dolphins 86% of you favor the Raiders. 14% favor the Dolphins. We'll take the Raiders by 7. The Vikings are hoping that this game won't be lost by a field goal as they host the Seattle Seahawks. A difference of just two plays separates the Vikings from being 2-0 versus 0-2. For the Seahawks it was a tough one last week but Russell Wilson and his league-leading 146 passer rating will look to light it up this Sunday. Looking at the polls 78% of you believe that Russ will cook and beat the Vikings while 22% of you are favoring Minnesota. We believe that the Seahawks are going to win but it's going to be close. Seahawks by 4. By far the game of the week. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers versus the Los Angeles Rams. Both teams seem like they have everything together on offense and defense. Tom Brady is playing better than ever at 44 years old while Matthew Stafford seems like he's the best thing that could ever happen to the Rams. Looking at the polls 67% favor the defending Super Bowl champs while 33% are going with the Rams. We're going with the Rams to win by just one point. Matt Gay gets his revenge on his former team. Sunday Night Football the Green Bay Packers versus the San Francisco 49ers. Aaron Rodgers shut the media up and showed that he still wanted the best in the game. Meanwhile the 49ers are undefeated and Kyle Shanahan has a history of not just beating the Packers but beating them by a significant margin. Looking at the polls 63% of you say that doesn't matter. We're still going with the Packers while 38% of you think that the 49ers are going to stay undefeated. And finally the Monday Night Football game will be an NFC East showdown between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys rebounded last week after losing a heartbreaker to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Meanwhile the Eagles lost to the 49ers and start the season one-in-one. Looking at the polls 65% of you believe that the Cowboys do have some winning mentality inside of them while 35% are favoring Jalen Hertz in the Eagles. We're taking the Cowboys to win by four.


Welcome to the future of cities by Finnish Flow. Finnish Flow is coordinating the Finnish business community for participation at Davos side events, the World Economic Forum side events. Finland has a lot to offer in the global context and this is what we are shining a light on as Finnish Flow community with our amazing partners. This is our first year and this is our great big opening for the Finnish Flow. Thank you very much for all coming here. And now when we're entering the flow, I would love to introduce our dear partner, future of cities, Tony Cho. Thank you, Janna. Thank you, esteemed guests. Thank you, Deepak. Thank you, Elena. Thank you, Satguru. What a phenomenal experience today of transformation, aligned thinkers, working on global transition to a more regenerative future. At the future of cities we are aiming to impact the lives of a billion people through innovations in the built environment. And today I'm hopeful and so grateful to my partners from Finnish Flow and to be part of this beautiful Finnish community of innovators and impact investors and technologists and visionaries. It's a true honor and I can only imagine and dream together with you guys what the future will hold. Thank you so much. Thank you. And then we move into this very, very special wisdom panel. On this panel our panelists will offer a mix of spiritual leadership and next generation indigenous wisdom. Helena Gualinga is an environmental and human rights activist from Ecuador. Her activism includes exposing the conflict between her community and oil companies by carrying and empowering message among the youth in local schools in Ecuador and also globally. She's a youth ambassador of the Arctic Base Camp here in Davos and they have facilitated her attendance to Davos. Dr. Deepak Chopra is the founder of Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism. And Global also founder of Chopra Global, a modern day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality. Satguru is a yogi, mystic and visionary who has founded the Global Isha Foundation launching large ecological initiatives. Satguru is currently also on a solo tour driving a motorcycle from London to India advocating the conscious planet movement to save the planet's soil. And tonight we'll have a wonderful moderator, Vera Futorianski, a CEO at Veritas Ventures, a woman in tech and VC and a global speaker. That being said, over to you Vera. Thank you so much, my microphone. Thank you so much, Janna and Risto. Welcome everyone. I might be biased of course but I don't think there's a more interesting, more exciting, more mind-expanding panel in all of Davos 2022 than this one. So you definitely are in the right place. Welcome. Welcome also to everyone who's watching live. Is it this camera? So welcome everyone. Let's dive right in. We only have 35 minutes unfortunately because Satguru will have to travel so we'll go right in. As we all know our planet is facing a lot of global challenges. This week we all and the leaders gather here. We're also leaders to find solutions for a more sustainable future. In this discussion we'll cover three critical points. The soil crisis. As we all know it's a big issue. So the economists covered today we'll talk about food crisis. If we don't make any changes in the next 10 years, if I got it right, the next 100 years there will be a food crisis on the planet. Already 52% of agricultural soil is degraded. In 20 years 40% less food is expected to be produced for the 9.3 billion people who will be living on our planet. Then we'll talk about the loss of biodiversity. Global loss of biodiversity is at its worst as you know. And only 5% of indigenous people, I mean there are only 5% of indigenous people and they are the stewards of 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity. Alina is here with us who will talk about it. And of course not many of us touch soil on a daily basis or not many of us live in the jungle, in the forest. So we will also talk about anxiety and depression and without also about this shift, this conscious shift we need to understand the world better and how we can become more aware conscious metahumans and for that we'll have Dr. Deepak Chopra inviting us into it. But we'll start with Sadguru. It's such a pleasure to be sitting next to you. I mean it's such an honor really. You are now on a motorcycle from London to India. You've been to many places, you have this extraordinary campaign, you're meeting so many people, you also created a catchy song around it. We're wonder singing it, but could you please share why you do it and maybe most importantly also share a couple of tangible projects that have manifested along the way already. Good evening to everyone. Is it okay? Well, the last 30 years I've been talking about soil at various levels and we have launched projects. What I see is when I talk about the nature of soil and where it is going, everybody says, Sadguru, this is great, fantastic and they go to sleep. And as I speak to various agricultural ministries all over the world everybody seems to know the problem. Everybody knows the general direction of the solution.  So here I am. We started this journey at the age of sixty-five, riding thirty thousand kilometers is an insane project. But we have completed sixty-five days and I'm still here and I have done four hundred and sixty-seven events in the sixty-five days. The social media metrics is showing that about 2.1 billion people have addressed soil in the last sixty-five days since we started the movement. The idea of this movement is to move at least sixty percent of the adult population on the planet to be concerned about soil, to say something about soil. Because in a democracy the only currency is numbers. If the numbers are there every government will move. At the same time we have to understand this that not in a single nation has ever, sixty percent of the population has stood up and expressed their concern for some long-term well-being of their nation or their children or anything like this. They're asking for trinkets. They want one percent tax reduction and they're getting it. Nobody has ever asked. So this is what we're trying to do now. We want sixty percent of the population, adult population to express concern for long-term well-beings. Why this is important is we elect governments for four to five-year terms. So we give them a four-year mandate and naturally they are focusing to fulfill that in four years, whatever they can do. Nobody wants to invest in something which will bear fruit after fifteen, twenty years because whenever political leaders make an attempt to address long-term well-being of their nation they lose their election next time. This has been the history of political life on this planet. This changing this is very important. That large number of people over sixty percent when they say that they are concerned about it now governments feel comfortable to invest long-term. We have written to seven hundred and thirty political parties on the planet to include soil as a part of their manifestos, soil ecology as a part of their manifestos because all the manifestos are only about tax cuts, this rebate, that rebate, never really long-term well-being. Why soil is such an important thing? This is the first time in the history of humanity we are addressing soil as soil extinction. The UN agencies are using the term soil extinction. Extinction means you always thought it's either a dinosaur or a dodo but we are talking about soil extinction and in eighty-five percent of the nations that I have spoken to still agriculture ministries are addressing soil as an inert substance. It is very important that first of all we recognize soil as the largest living system, not just on this planet in the known universe. A handful of soil has over eighty-five percent of life for us. We are just a consequence of what is happening in the fifteen to eighteen inches of soil. If we have to bring this to context in some way, see before photosynthesis started nearly a billion years ago the oxygen content in our atmosphere was just one percent. Today it is twenty-one percent. It is because of this we have evolved this way, it is because of this we are breathing and alive right now. But in the last thousand years we have removed eighty-five percent of the photosynthesis on the planet. What is the plan really? Everybody is busy talking about carbon dioxide. I know it is an issue, I'm not saying it's not an issue. That is also a significant issue but if we put fair measuring mechanisms over forty percent of the global warming and climate change is happening because of plowed lands. Fifty-four percent of the earth's land is plowed, seriously plowed. Another eighteen to twenty percent is partially done. So nearly seventy-one percent of the land is under agriculture. This largest piece of geography where men and women are every day tending to it, we can't fix that. But everybody is talking about fixing the ocean, rain forest. Cheese comes from there, but most other people who are living in cities they have never seen what's a rain forest. As far as the rain forest is concerned, if you just stay out of it, it will be doing great. There is no need for anybody to have a project for that. Forest is something that's managed itself for millions of years. It can last for millions of more years. It doesn't need our help, it just needs some respite from us. But agricultural land is part of our nourishment process. It is part of our economic process. And this is where the real problem is and that's not been addressed. This is why the safe soil movement, as I said, sixty-five days, we are on. Another thirty-plus days are there. So we want to get this to four billion people so that every government on the planet responds to this. What is the way out? This will always be the thing. I can leave the, you know, the simple policy we have done. One important thing we need to do with soil is we need to separate soil from the rest of the issues that we are trying to handle. Right now I've looked at the European Common Agricultural Policy. It's too complex. By the time you implement this, there will be debates and debates for another ten to fifteen years' time before actual application comes because this involves major industries, major lobbies in the world. It's not going to work like that. But if you talk about enhancing soil organic content, there is nobody on the planet who is against it. Not fertilizer industries, not pesticide industries. Nobody is against it. Everybody is for it because rich soil is the fundamental of rich life and good life for us. A healthy soil and healthy life are inextricably connected. There is no way about it. This is very simple. This does not need any great amount of technology. This doesn't need any great amount of financial outlays. It just needs that right now we are facing a wall. If we face the door and we are committed to going through the door in the next ten to fifteen years, we can make a significant turnaround. We have prepared 193 soil policy handbooks for 193 different nations considering their latitudinal position, their soil types, their economic conditions and their agricultural traditions because even if you have all the signs, you cannot turn the agricultural traditions around. Overnight it takes a certain amount of time. You have to work with this. These things have been presented to the nations. I addressed COP 15 just last week in Kodi War and the response has been great. Seventy-four nations have signed up for save soil policy right now and it is a way forward. We need all of you to enhance the message. Do not think this is my project. This is not my project. You don't have to talk about me. Talk about soil. Make sure everybody talks about soil because this is where our future is. There are many other issues in the world. I'm not saying they are not important. They are important, but first we have to be alive to handle other issues. If soil starts degenerating right now, twenty-seven thousand species per year are going extinct organisms. It is a slide. It is expected in twenty-five to forty years we will get to a place where even if we want to regenerate the soil we will not be able to do it because that will be the level of biodiversity loss. In my gut feeling, I don't have any signs for this, in my gut feeling, this slide will not remain a slide. At some point it will be a tumble. Before it goes into a tumble we have to push the slide backwards. Otherwise we will be a very regretful generation. So much and without soil we won't have nutritious food. I think even now ninety percent of food has lost its nutrition and I would like before all those hundred-fifty leaders leave this room I would like for them to have almost like a call to action. What can everyone do on an individual basis? Because many of us think our individual actions don't matter and something big has to be done. But as little as for the climate change not leaving your flower on the floor in the hotel and not having a clean towel every day. So maybe about the soil we can also speak what can an individual do on an individual basis? What can we do each one of us to save soil? Say the moment, hello. The moment you say that everybody want to roll up their sleeves and go and fix their kitchen garden. That's very cute. But that is not a solution. We've passed that stage. We've passed that stage where I do something wonderful you do something wonderful and there will be a solution. We have well passed that stage we should have done this in seventies. You can't be talking about this in twenty twenty-two. Let's do something little and be happy. If you're doing this for your personal satisfaction that's different. If you're doing it for a solution right now unless this is enshrined in the policy of the world there will be no solution because you're addressing seventy-one percent of Earth's geography. This is not going to be fixed by me doing something cute in my house and you doing wonderful things. Even if you have ten thousand acres of land if you fix it it's still not a solution because there is no guarantee the next generation will do the same thing for you unless it is made a law. When I say a law see in urban lands there are laws if you have ten thousand square feet of land you cannot build a ten thousand square feet of building. They will allow you to build six, seven, eight thousand square feet but if you have ten thousand square ten thousand acres of land you can plow every inch of it turn it into a desert in ten, fifteen years time nobody will ask you why have you done it should this change or not? Thank you. Helena thank you so much for flying all the way from Ecuador. It's really a pleasure to have you here with the beautiful earrings. I was just checking if she used those feathers to fly here. Beautiful though. Thank you. I know we don't bring enough I mean we're here in Davos and its history has been pretty much people of one color making decisions wouldn't bring enough indigenous people to the table I think it's so important to have people at the table whose lives would decide upon. They're not at the table now so it's a really big pleasure to have you here. I think it's really important also for the audience to know that. For the little girl come on. Yeah, wonderful. Helena and I did use fossil fuels to fly. Well, but we need to hear her voice. Just kidding.  I think important for everyone to know and Helena will speak more about it that only one of few groups were able to protect the forest. The indigenous people are one of the few groups that can protect it and Helena's tribe, if that's correct, took the Ecuadorian government to court in 2011 and won that battle. I mean that that's again to win the battle. It's a first of its kind. Could you please tell us a little bit more about it and especially what role the indigenous women play in it? Yeah, of course. Hi everyone. Thank you for being here. It's a pleasure to share this panel with you. I come from a community called Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian rainforest. I grew up there and I also partly grew up in Finland. But when I was the year I was born, which is in 2002 an oil company entered my community without my people's consent. And there was this immediate response to this which was, no, we don't want you here. We had already seen the devastating impacts that the oil industry would have in the Amazon rainforest. What it would do to our health, what it would do to our water. We have really horrible examples of what the oil industry's activities lead to in the Amazon. So we had this very clear idea of we don't want the oil industry here. And this is 20 years ago when no one knew what the Amazon rainforest was basically. There was no media covering this. There were no international NGOs, governments, nothing working in the Amazon or to protect the Amazon. So we were a community of a thousand people facing two of the biggest powers of my country, which is the government and the oil company. My people knocked on every door they could find, which was taking them to a small court in the region. When that didn't work, they didn't accept the case. They took it to the national court. They did not accept the case. And 10 years later, in 2012, we were able to take the Ecuadorian state to international court for violating our human rights and for not respecting our rights to our territory. This was the first one of its kind in not just the Amazon, not just in Ecuador, but in Latin America. So this changed the entire future of indigenous peoples' rights and our right to our territory across Latin America, not just in my country. The indigenous women. And of course, I mean, that is those 10 years. I was really, really young when all of this was happening. I come from a family who's been very involved in this process. My aunt, my mother, my uncles, they've all been leaders in my community. So I was always kind of running around. My mom was a leader at the time. I was someone who would never leave my mom's side. So I was attending all her meetings from the age of four until now, whenever I can. And, you know, yeah, we had a really strong leadership from the women in the community. And the women were actually the first ones to say no. When the proposal of the oil companies came, they were the first one to say, no, we don't want this for our children. We don't want our children bathing in oil. That's what they said. So it's really important to understand this relationship with that women have not only to land, but the entire rainforest, the entire ecosystem. And as you were saying before, we indigenous people, we only make up 5% of the world's population, but we have 80% of the world's biodiversity in our territories. But inside of this statistic, these numbers, those territories are taken care mostly by women. So it's really, really important when we're talking about these things in these spaces that we actually have a gender lens, climate change impacts women more in so many ways. And the violence that comes from the oil companies and the state is always going to affect women more. But women are also the custodians of these lands. And my sister always says this. She says, we have an experience as indigenous people when we're facing extractivism, when we're facing racism. But indigenous women have one specific experience of all of this. And that is something that is really important to be aware of. Thank you. We're protecting all Mother Earth. Thank you. And going back to this landmark victory that we had 10 years ago now, we've been able to see many, many more victories in the Amazon to protect the Amazon rainforest because it created this really important legal president. And now just a year ago, two years ago, we had a really important victory in the equator in Amazon where thousands of hectares of land were protected. And this is because this really, really small community, which I come from, took the state to court and won. So yeah, it's really important. Thank you so much. I'm just being told that the guru has to leave in five minutes already. Dr. Chopra, do you mind if we let the guru speak for five minutes, a few minutes and then... Absolutely. I don't have to say anything. No, we have so many questions. You have to. The whole net is human. Everybody wants to know about it. But yes, then... Because this is about cities, I thought I shouldn't go without saying anything about it. This happened to me. I was to speak in the San Francisco Union Club, San Francisco Club for a group of business people. I was driving about an hour. We were driving an electric car, but I saw both sides of the road were packed with cars. So this person who's a large-scale business there, I asked, what is the problem that people who work... live here, work there, those who live there work here, what is this problem we have? You live in one place, work in the opposite direction, those who live there work in the opposite direction. Why can't we at least rejig this a little bit? So as a part of that, I came up with the concept of one building city that today these proposals are still floating around with the South Indian governments. It should become a reality in the next few years. That is outside the city, go 30, 40, 50 kilometers away from the city, 50-acre land, only one acre you build, you can build 50 to 100 floors if you want. These remaining 49 acres will be completely eco-friendly, enough forest, enough agriculture. If you wish to do, you can grow enough fruits and vegetables that you need for this community. Up to 10,000 people can live in the city. We cap the city as 10,000 is a limit for a city. Don't have to be 10 million. It's such a mess, these 10 million cities. 10,000. The major cities that we have could be slowly converted into really cultural attractions where people can come once in a week, in the weekend or whatever. Whole week you don't have to start your car, completely no wastage going out. We have designed cities like this. I feel this should be the future because if you do not urbanize rural areas, the urban centers are becoming more and more chaotic and senseless and the amount of power and the amount of requirement that is there, the ecological footprint of an urban center is too heavy. This will not happen unless investment shift. Right now the number somebody was telling me here that 72% of the world's investment is in 31 cities on the planet. With this, how do you expect people to be farming in another 30 years? We did a survey in India out of 63% of Indian population which is in farming right now. Not even 2% of the farmers want their children to become farmers. This is where food security problem is. Unless we create urbanized villages, unless we make it attractive for people to live on the land, most people as they get qualified, they will all pile up into the cities. I think this is something we must avoid. Those of you who are looking at the future cities must definitely address this issue. I'm extremely sorry. I'm never known to do this leaving halfway through the meeting. This is not me but I have a tomorrow 11 o'clock, I have a big event in Muscat. I need to be there and I have to fly now. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I'll just move closer to you and we'll continue.


Hi, my name is Leon Rowe, currency trader, a trading coach at Trading180.com and welcome to this week's forex weekly analysis for the week starting the 18th of December. And this will be the last weekly video for the year. I will put out some content during the next couple of weeks, but you know, for just the weekly analysis, there's going to be nothing until 2024. I do wish you all a Merry Christmas if you're celebrating and happy holidays and hope you have a great one and a great 2024. Anyways, now getting into the week ahead and looking at the United States, November's personal income and outlays report, notably featuring the closely observed PCE price index will take centre stage along with the final reading of the Q3 GDP growth, CB consumer confidence and durable goods orders. The housing sector will be under scrutiny as investors closely monitor key indicators, including building permits, housing starts and existing and new home sales that all kind of contributes to gross domestic products and shifting attention. Internationally, the United Kingdom will report on inflation and retail sales while Japan's focus will be on the Bank of Japan interest rate decision, interest rates and foreign trade data that is very important. We'll get into that as we get into the weekly analysis in Germany as we'll turn to the LFO business climate index, JFK consumer confidence and producer inflation figures and Canada is set to unveil inflation rates for November's GDP growth rate. So yeah, this week is probably likely to be a bit of a quiet week, although there is news coming out and data coming out, but pretty much the market is likely to be maybe a bit muted as volume starts to dry up. So getting into the weekly analysis and really starting off on the dollar index and the dollar index, just a measure of strength really on the dollar against the major currencies. And so looking at where the dollar is technically, probably looking at that area there in terms of demand for the dollar and zooming out a bit, you look at the yearly high and yearly low, we're down into really beyond what I would call fair value, 50% is fair value. And so we're coming down into potentially a bargain area, how do you know this is a bargain? This is where you start to look at the fundamentals and really the fundamentals are saying, according to this Bloomberg article, let me just scroll up that Fed prepares to shift to rate cuts in 2024 as inflation eases. And so the Federal Reserve pivoted towards reversing the steepest interest rate hikes in a generation after containing an inflation surge so far without a recession or significant cost to employment. And so updated quarterly forecast showed the Fed officials expect to lower rates by 75 basis points next year, a sharper pace of cuts that indicated in September, sorry, while the median expectation for the federal funds rate at the end of 2012 and 24 was 4.6, individuals' expectations varied wildly. And the federal funds futures markets are now pricing in six rate cuts for next year, up from four earlier this week as traders have fully priced in a rate cut in the Fed's March meeting. So what does that all pretty much mean? Forex is really driven by interest rates and that's really a main driver. It's not the only driver, but it's the main driver. And so the more I guess central banks pricing in the market prices in rate cuts or rate hikes is what you'll see is that that will be reflected on a price chart in currency appreciation or devaluation. So cuts will really mean devaluation and hikes will mean appreciation. And so you've seen this move right here, this was due to rate hikes and now you're seeing the expectation of rate cuts being priced into the market. It's never usually a straight line. Of course, this one seemed like it, but typically you do have higher lows and higher highs, lower highs, lower lows. Now the dollar, I do think that although economically the dollar is one of the strongest currencies, I think mainly they are going to be one of the first to continue cutting and cutting big and it's really due to the election cycle. I was talking about this with the guys in the private mentoring group that although fundamentally you would really kind of understand that there are other currencies that are in a worse economic situation that should really, they should really be cutting first, but it's an election year next year and so rate cuts they pretty much help with Joe Biden, right, in terms of putting money in people's pockets, boosting the economy and so I think that the dollar will cut rates and be one of this first central banks to cut rates and that's really the narrative going on at the moment and I'm going to run with it. So for me, the dollar although not an all outsell against all currencies, I do think is likely to be a sell going into 2024 and so if we look for pullbacks or if I'm looking for pullbacks anyway into any kind of daily supply zones, that is really where I'm looking at some sales of caution necessarily, I'm not looking to trade the US dollar index, but this is just a confluence and understanding where we are in terms of lower highs and lower lows, we know that this was a an expensive area for the dollar because it made new lows, so if you do pull back anywhere around this area, I think that's going to be quite nice for a sell trade. There are reasons to buy the dollar as well as I said, the dollar you can, although you wouldn't typically sell the dollar under these situations, I just think that because it's an election year and the market is pricing in, are going to be pricing in more cuts and the Fed are pricing in cuts as well, I think the dollar is likely to be more of a sell than a buy and that's really the narrative that I'm going with looking at the dollar yen and the dollar yen, the yen is looking like a buy and this is really due to the fact that they are the only central bank who are looking to high crates in 2024, so looking at the Japanese yen, the big currency flop of 2023 is top pick four year ahead again, so basically it was three straight years of outsize declines in the yen look set to end in 2024 and that's the view of market participants pulled by Bloomberg who on balance see the currency rallying next year as the Bank of Japan exits the world's last negative interest rate regime and its global peers cut borrowing costs, so while the rest of the major central banks are cutting interest rates, they are going to be hiking interest rates and it says here the situation won't disappoint the end bulls on this occasion, as said Shoki Omori a strategist at Mizuho Securities Co in Tokyo who seized a prolonged slump in the currency coming to an end, there's a lot of room for the Bank of Japan to tighten policy but they do seem determined, sorry there's not a lot of room for the Bank of Japan to tighten policy but they do seem determined to rip up negative interest rates and so I think this is going to be one of the trades for 2024, also if of course that does come to fruition in terms of the Bank of Japan looking to hike rates, so I think any pullbacks against pretty much all currencies are going to be nice buying opportunities for the yen meaning if it's the quote currency you're looking at short rates, so that's where really I am in terms of my bias, the dollar Swiss, dollar Swiss again looking at this and zooming out over the year year to date we are really down into these you know from yearly highs to yearly lows and so we are at these these lows right here, could this be a potential buy, again I don't think that the dollar is terrible but in based off of just interest rate leading in lagging in terms of who's leading the interest rate cut narrative, it looks like you're probably looking at some more short trades so looking at supply from here zooming in a bit and waiting for maybe some pullbacks into this area here or you've got a supply zone that was about there so you could look for any pullbacks up into that area there, so decent short trades if you're looking at shorts and buying Swiss franc over the US dollar if you're looking to buy the US dollar then you are you know looking for pullbacks into this demand zone before looking at the any kind of buy trades and that's to say that the dollar's going to fall off a cliff and go you know way beyond but there will be buying opportunities to buy the dollar but again I think from an interest rate perspective it looks like the dollar with cutting rates should actually look to fall into next year. Dollar CAD pretty much similar across the board, the CAD I don't necessarily like the CAD in terms of current fundamentals but I think they're probably like neck and neck with the dollar in terms of cutting rates so yeah I think this is probably a bit more of a trickier trade at the moment but if you are looking to buy I think right now is a decent area to look for buy trades we pretty much saw in the past that we've had you know this area was seen as a bargain price that may lead to new higher highs so we can see that potentially happening now or if we're looking at for example yearly highs and yearly lows really the yearly low would be somewhere down these one three ones between one three two fifty one three ones but if you are looking for short trades meaning you're buying the Canadian dollar then you're looking at the supply zones and so yeah any pullbacks into supply are decent areas to look for some short trades. Looking at the pound dollar and the pound did have actually some decent news recently UK companies report strongest growth in six months S&P says and so British companies saw the strongest rebound in output in six months reflecting more stable borrowing costs and higher demand for services a survey of purchasing manager showed and so that is positive for the for GDP although they did have some GDP news that came out that was not great it was a month month I think it was and so the I think the UK economy is expected to to kind of flat line and stagnate but yeah with the dollar looking at cutting rates sooner than the British pound you're likely to probably see any moves down to you know demand zones as potential buy trades and so this is probably where the next demand zone is and then you've got one just below here so any pullbacks into these zones I think a decent buying opportunities if you're looking to sell the dollar and again as the dollar devalues just naturally you're going to get the the pound moving higher or you should get the pound moving higher barring some economic catastrophe and then if the market starts to reprice the interest rates for the pound moving moving forward in terms of closer then in fact the pound will actually start to get weaker but I do think that currently with all the data that we know the the the dollar looks like it's still likely to devalue for a little bit the pound yen and again the yen I think should be the currency to buy for 2024 as they are the only currency and central bank that look into high crates and so where we sit at the moment in terms of supply and demand I think I'll just draw a bit of a demand zone right there I think any pullbacks into this supply zone up top and this high this high lower high I think it's going to be really nice for a short trade as we head into uh black said 2024 or we're looking at a buy trade right around here um especially down into these one seven seven lows again it really just depends on whether um the data does support the buying of uh of the yen so let's see if the data can support the uh the rate uh potential rate hikes looking at the euro dollar and the euro dollar um I'm going to go over a losing trade that I had um last week and um for anyone uh that sticks around I'll do it at the end of this uh this video and I one winner one loser I lost a trade on the um on the euro dollar an interesting one and then I am profitable on a New Zealand CAD trade which is going okay at the moment so looking at uh where we are from a euro dollar perspective um we have come up into this uh supply zone here bounced off it twice or once and then twice again um again I'm like I hesitate to really want to buy the euro um simply because although the dollar is you know doing um is is looking to cut rates I do think that it's neck and neck when it comes to um when they look likely to cut rates and so I do think that there's reasons to buy and there's also reasons to sell the um the uh the euro uh the 110 seems to be all just thereabouts is likely to be the the ceiling um for the the euro dollar I think at least in the short term um unless again there is some major news and improvements for the euro or there is deteriorating news and data for the US that's where you're likely to see prices break out of uh this uh 110 to 10750 or 10720 um uh auction or what is commonly known as a arrange and um looking at the fundamentals with latest really kind of uh statements from Christine Lagarde in the ECB and it says that ECB holds rates with inflation sinking but hastens bond exits so um you know the ECB uh sees weaker economy denting inflation and the risks to economic growth remain tilted to the downside Christine Lagarde told reporters Thursday in Frankfurt though she suggested that dangers for prices are more balanced and when they talk about prices talking about inflation growth could be lower if the effects of monetary policy turn out stronger than expected she warned so if if interest rates are too high and uh high interest rates do contract the economy because they make borrowing and lending costs higher which affects businesses and um and consumers right so it says here traders pulled back bets on ECB rate cuts next year now seeing one five five uh basis points of 165 basis points of easing compared to about 160 basis points earlier in the session so um again traders uh slightly readjusting uh their rate cut expectations only just um not by much and markets are pricing in an ECB cut as soon as March though Lagarde her has said no moves should be expected in the next couple of quarters so let's see whether um the market is right or she's right so um I think if she's right and there are no uh rate cuts by March then you're likely to see the the euro actually continue to move higher the euro dollar so let's see what happens there but for now I think there are reasons to buy and reasons to sell the euro dollar although I don't like the euro in terms of uh nothing personal but just from a uh data looking at the data perspective um I wouldn't put my money on the euro euro yen this could be a really nice trade um into 2024 I think the euro should decline and the the yen should be the one to buy again just if the data does support the uh the yen buying and the bank of Japan looking to uh high crates this year so we've got a nice um supply zone so any pullbacks up into the 157 157 68 area I think is going to be decent for a short I think anything above there I think you'd have to price will have to kind of create a level before looking at going short but that's really where my bias is if you are looking to buy the the euro then really down into this demand zone where we are is probably where you're looking to potentially uh buy the euro pound and the euro pound I think the pound has the edge on the euro at the moment so I think the par for these resistance is still to the downside although we've pulled back up into this uh this high this might be decent on a lower time frame uh to look for uh some short trades but from a supply zone perspective daily supply zone doesn't look like much you do have a level of support and resistance right here which it looks like price is reacting from um but let's see I think if uh many of the guys might may know this the stop hunt setup that we use I think this level here is a decent stop hunt the one uh sorry the 0.86352 area could be nice for a for a stop hunt but if you are looking for buy trades on the euro uh pound looking to buy the uh the pound sorry buy the euro against the other pound then you're looking at really a pull back probably down into uh actually let's see yeah maybe pull back down into these levels here before looking at getting short from the daily supply zone looking to find the pound and you're really waiting for price to come back to the 0.87 area which I don't know whether that will happen anytime soon uh euro swiss um as a result of a weak uh euro the swiss frank uh typically does um strengthen also as well the swiss frank scene at the moment as maybe one of the last central banks to uh cut rates um again there's a bit of mixed data around that but if that does turn out to be true in terms of the euro do end up cutting rates sooner than the uh swiss frank and the swiss national bank then again you're likely to see prices continue to uh to fall one thing to just be aware of though is that we are at uh multi year lows I think if you're looking at all of the data prices haven't been this low since um since september 2022 let's zoom out a little bit more actually we still got a little bit ways to go from uh 2015 remember that day as well when the swiss national bank decoupled from the euro that would send the send the euro down something like 2000 pips or something like that in a day um so this is we're going to be really the absolute low um still ways to go but if you are looking to short just be mindful that um you know you are short and kind of into lows you're really waiting for maybe a pull back up into an area maybe one of these uh the highs here before looking at getting short the australian dollar us dollar now the ozzy is again one of my uh top picks as well for next year so um I am looking to buy the um the australian dollar against various other currencies so my bias is really to look for any pullbacks into uh demand that was uh um a nice trade that had pulled back into a um an area here all right so that was really nice uh last a couple weeks ago move uh higher if you are looking to short the uh the australian dollar us dollar you've got quite a wide zone of supply here and when you get a wide zone of supply then what you do just break that down and you're one of the things you can use is uh an area of uh support and resistance within that area of supply and so if prices do come back up to over there or you've got a little one here as well um that could be decent in terms of uh looking at you know short trades but my bias would be if the uh the federal reserve are looking to cut rates first then um that should keep the uh the dollar us dollar weak against the australian dollar and any pullbacks are probably looking at buying opportunities australian yen again if the uh bank in japan are the uh only central bank next year to uh high trades then you would expect really the uh the yen to strengthen to some degree either there or there um again it really does depend upon the uh what the central bank uh say as well as the data but you know the market is trying to get ahead and anticipate that you know this is basically going to be uh happening in 2024 so i do think any moves to the downside uh pullbacks are going to be nice uh shorting opportunities in anticipation of that and finally looking at gold and so gold should be the uh the buy going into 2024 um one of the one of the things about gold that um um may keep it capped is the fact that if the us kind of avoid a recession right so if they avoid a recession then gold um may not be necessarily the all out buy um because although gold is a uh it is a uh a flat of quality in terms of um a safe haven asset safe haven meaning that in a recession or when there's risk uncertainty and and uh fear that the that gold will you know mark the market will tend to flood into gold but um if that doesn't happen then um gold may be capped to the upside but if the dollar does continue to devalue just purely as a you know um uh as that as gold obviously works uh opposite to an inversely correlated or yeah inversely correlated to gold then you should have uh gold go higher as the dollar you know devalue so that's really the the idea so i think any pullbacks into uh demand zone on demand zones should be really the the path at least resistance to uh to the upside so that's really where we are uh going into 2024 now uh getting into uh one winner one loser and looking at the euro dollar so looking at the euro dollar and uh it was a trade that i took on the uh friday the eighth of december and um typically i don't take trades at lows in terms of i don't sell at lows and buy at highs the first time i've done it in years and really the main reason why i did so was because on that day the uh non-farm payrolls had come out way better than expected and our employment rate came down lower than expected and so typically that is and that is actually you know really good news in terms of um the uh the understanding that a better than expected economy is should push back interest rate cuts right and so what we did see is a bit of a sell-off right and i didn't get involved in the sell-off and then we got a pullback yeah we got a pullback into uh this area here about an hour later or so that's me about an hour and a half later so i considered that this is probably likely just taking out a lot of traders who had gone short based on the data so when prices came back up to uh the one seven was this one seventies and one oh seven seven which was yeah which was around here um i decided to get into a short with a 20-pip stop with the anticipation at prices likely just stopping out traders who went uh went short on the data right and we had even more positive data michigan consumer sentiment came out much higher than expected and uh you know prices should continue to the downside now again it's not 100 guaranteed or anything like that um but that was really the uh the thinking and the process behind it now typically as well what i do is i get myself to break even by when i get to a one to one position i take a half and then i'm looking for uh just to basically run the rest so that if i'm taken off half at a one to one i've only got a half a position in and uh if prices stop me out then i'm pretty much a break even but i was you know i had a bit of strong conviction that the um the dollar should roll over but unfortunately i didn't actually get myself to break even and uh paid the price by a losing trade uh so prices did come back up um and and stop me out on the Tuesday the 12th of December so uh that was a small loss by the way i didn't you know put in any kind of full position i was already in a couple of other trades and so i just didn't want to put too much in so it was a small loss but a loss never the less so again the lesson in this really is don't sell it lows and again there's so there's so many times where you see you know breakouts of levels and they do continue going down um the only reason like i said why i actually ended up taking this trade was because i thought there was a some manipulation going on in and around here uh it turns out that um obviously the uh the market was waiting for uh some more central bank news in terms of inflation which came out and inflation was still sticky but the big news really was uh fomc and so uh with the projections that came out for fomc and the dovish um federal reserve uh that was the reason why prices really kind of went to the uh to the upsides um because overall the the bigger picture is that the fed are looking to you know cut rates regardless of what is happening uh economically meaning that you know they they shouldn't really cut or look to cut rates when you have a you know a decent economy you would probably more likely to hold rates and inflation is coming back down to the 2 target but um with the fed being a bit dovish you know basically prices just pulled back and that was and that was that right so that was uh one of the losses now let's go to the next trade which so far has been um i mean i mean a break-even situation with a bit of profit and that is the new zealand dollar cat so the new zealand cad uh technically um we were at a really nice uh area of uh supply and um i wasn't necessarily looking at this uh currency pair during the week but there was some news that came out with regards to the new zealand economy unexpectedly contracting in the third quarter so revisions showed uh nation was in a recession earlier uh this year and traders increased bets on reserve bank rate cuts in 2024 so there's that theme right and so um because the uh new zealand economy unexpectedly contracted in the third quarter fueling bets that the central bank would start cutting interest rates um uh this it was on it was on actually the the thursday the uh the the 14th right that happened i think it was overnight and so um what i did was i saw a really nice entry around here uh with a 15-pip stop i think i had something like that it was about a 15-pip stop and so from and that was the entry there and on this occasion i did take uh partial profits uh um at breakeven at a one-to-one so put took 50 percent off and now it's uh just a situation where now i can't lose on the trade if uh basically prices pulled back and stopped me out somewhere up here then um i'm pretty much done at breakeven right so um i'm looking for really prices to come down to at least the minimum of around uh this low here where we've got uh what's known as an unfair auction some traders will call it a fair value gap it's actually known as an unfair auction uh but somewhere around these areas here the 0.812 0.813 so that's really what i'm looking for so a decent risk reward uh trade and hopefully you know prices do roll over we do have um inflation rate year on year and so if this does come out higher than expected that would actually be positive for the canadian dollar and so i do think that prices may start to roll over as the market maybe prices out uh sooner rate cuts for the canadian economy so uh my my really my thesis is if the um new zealand dollar economy is contracting or is contracted what's going to push prices really above here so the likelihood i'm not saying that it can't happen but the likelihood is less for it for the new zealand dollar to appreciate and so i think going into 2024 uh barring any again major downside news for the canadian dollar and upside news for the new zealand dollar prices should want to fall away now if for example the data comes out for the canadian dollar and it's worse than expected let's say inflation comes out at 2.8 2.7 2.6 um that's really going to um push the expectation that the the bank of canada are likely to cut rates sooner and so i'll probably just get out of this trade with a uh with a small win but let's see what happens but those are really the two trades one winner one loser um of course i can't go into the full strategy of what i do around here on full entries uh that's really kind of reserved for the uh the private members group which opens up by the way in january 2024 early january early to mid january um i'll i'll put the date out probably either uh by the time you see this video or just check on the trading 180 website and uh at some point this week and i will have uh the the opening dates for you in case you would like to join and learn more about how to apply fundamental analysis to your technicals so guys again hope you have a great trading um what's a trading week not really this week but i hope you've had a great trading year if not don't worry as long as you're still in the game and you haven't blown up your account um then you're in your right and if you have blown up your account don't worry um just learn from risk management and uh you know get back in the game and in fact you might want to give my mentor a ring a go so uh guys take care speak to you soon all the best stay blessed and uh merry christmas and a happy new year


Every first Saturday of the month, I give you an audition recap so that you can see where I get my auditions and then maybe you'll be able to also do it the same way. And I am based out of San Francisco and LA. So if you're somewhere else, it might not be the same, but at least you know somebody is actually using these casting websites. This month, I got 14 auditions. Usually for my audition recaps, I just tell you, these are the auditions that I did. Maybe I show you a little clip, but I thought it would be fun to actually look at some of the full things. Some of these are pretty boring and very, very basic, so we'll only watch a couple of seconds. I had 14 auditions this month and nine of them were self-tapes like this. Out of the 14 auditions I did this month, eight were commercial auditions. One was a voiceover audition. One was a UGC, which is user-generated content. One was an industrial. I love doing student projects if I'm not already booked on something because it's essentially me going back into class and also being able to teach new directors and writers how to work with actors. And yes, I do get paid for those student projects. I did have a Zoom audition and that was for a student project. I did not book that one, but I did get two direct bookings for that university becasting director has just hired me a bunch of times because she likes the way I act and the way I work with students.  This first audition was for Christmas commercial and I know it was for a car commercial and I have not seen this since I turned it in on October 2nd. OK, the directions were that I got into a car and I think one of the scenes is I'm waiting for my husband and then the other one is we're singing Christmas songs and I do remember I was singing and I was very excited and happy to be singing this. Oh, in that part, I'm reacting to my son clicking on the center console to put like the location, the North Pole or something like that. Hola, Felicia de los Reyes. Hi, my name is Belgica Rodriguez and I do have a driver's license. For the full body shot, I did do it vertically because I just have to.  Maybe do it outside. I've never heard somebody say, oh, my God, please don't send me that again. A vertical shot of just your full body shot. I thought that audition was fine. It was for a non speaking role. They just wanted us to speak. They wanted to see what we actually look like when we're talking and singing and interacting instead of having to pantomime singing like. That was me singing. I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, which I could not resist. And I did sing it along with myself. So that was for a mom, non speaking role for a car commercial. This next one is a Samsung commercial and it was also for a mom. I audition a lot for a mom.  But this was also a Christmas commercial, which is why I put on this sweater. I think this is just the most holiday sweater I own. Even though I love Christmas, this is just what I would wear to a Christmas party without being like ugly Christmas sweater. So it looks like I start with the sleep first. OK, I'm going to fast forward this part because the directions were very specific and they said, take a couple of seconds before you say anything so we can just see your face. And then also give us five seconds of your hands. So I tried to count in my head and then, of course, a full body shot vertical. Oh, I'm not worried either. He's a good boy. But maybe I should just call and check in still ringing. Oh, hi, honey. I must have dialed by accident. Weird. So how's everything? I do not love this audition. I think my performance was I should have taken a little bit more time. But you can see in the sides of the shot, it's my wall is exposed. And that's because I couldn't get a shot with me texting and it being really close up so that you wouldn't see the sides. And this is before I had my wider 86 inch and thunder gray, which I thought this blue was really cute and gave a touch of Christmas season because of like that blue ice that is in ice rinks. But that doesn't really matter. What really matters is my performance and my performance here was because I was supposed to be a worried mom checking in on a babysitter and my kid. And I just I don't love it. This one is a political audition. This does not represent how I voted, but I was on hold for this project and then eventually released. But this was an audition through my agency and it was through or a casting, which is an online based casting office. And they also have an event coming up that I'm going to be at. And they ended up casting me later this month. I care about my children's health and I care about the environment. So let's prevent wildfires, cut emissions and clean our air. I'm voting yes on 30. Hi, I'm Veljika Rodriguez, 5'10 with MDT agency. I thought this one was pretty good. There was a little white thing in my hair that maybe I should have done my slate again, but it's okay. It's not a deal breaker. What's really important, obviously, is your acting and how I feel about it. And I think it's a good idea to do that. And I think it's a good idea to do that. And I think it's a good idea to do that. And I think it's a good idea to do that. And I think it's a good idea to do that. I think it's a good idea to do that. And I think it's a good idea to do that. I just wanted to say that I was a reallyה in my home and I was not in a super fun acting. And how I prepared for this one was watch a bunch of prop, whatever number, real commercials, and in some of them, the people just seem so fake. Like it's really scripted. And then for some of them, they seem natural. And so I was trying to do as natural acting as I could similar to the commercials that I saw. with the mother. Oh my gosh. My mom. Another one from my agency and this one is for a bank. It's a bank commercial. Hi, my name is Belki Karol. I don't do origami but I am a very very crafty person and these are the couple of things that I am highly proficient at and it is knitting and something I'm working on right now for myself is a sewing project because first time out of the continent. Tips from my wallet for your wallet. Let's go baby. Let's go baby. So awkward.  This is so bad. I don't even want to show you but I am cutting this down a bit because this audition was a total of two minutes and 16 seconds and that last take I thought it was so funny. I just left it blurry because it was just like somebody who's not enthusiastic at all and was like yeah let's go baby you know so the fact that it was out of focus I thought was funny. I think this audition was fine at the beginning. They did want somebody who either made origami or something else with their hands so watching these back and of course just like editing and stuff I noticed that I say some words really funny or like air and in one of the auditions I said air funny and in this one I said something else a little funny but I'm just like I need to maybe do more of a warm up before I start filming these and really articulate all my words. Here's another one from my agency and I did not get on hold or booked but I do remember that they sent me basically a callback because they asked me to do the audition again but in Spanish because they did like the English one and they were like hmm we might be able to use you for both the English and the Spanish. This one was for an industrial and for any of these slates that you see I do them exactly as they have requested me to and takes issues like this very seriously. Yeah I thought this audition was fine. I had my fiance be my reader and I'm gonna cut out a lot of it just because this is an industrial and I don't want to expose their script. None of these are NDA by the way. This one is a hair audition. It's for a commercial for hair products and I got this from casting networks and let's take a look. I didn't have a tube top so I used a scarf. A lot of people do that. Hi my name is Beljika Rodriguez and an unexpected fact about me is that all of this beautiful long hair is going to get chopped. I'm getting married and I do want this long beautiful hair for the wedding for the photos to see what I can do with it and have fun but right after I'm going to do a bob because I've had it before. Okay I'm gonna fast forward this audition because they did give me a limit of three minutes and I sent them an audition that was exactly three minutes but it's just too long to watch right now and then they gave me some actions to do as well. I do love this product. It gives me so much volume. I am not wearing it right now but I only use it for like auditions or filming jobs because it is expensive. Did not get booked for this. I don't know why because I absolutely f***ing love my hair right now.  Okay I wasn't the kind of person who spent that much money on their hair but I recently got this haircut and I absolutely love it. The stylist is amazing but by far the most expensive haircut I've ever had and then the hair products that she recommended. I went ahead and bought because I just really loved the way she styled my hair and I do love the products that I bought. They're just really expensive so how many times have I said expensive? They're very costly so I use them carefully. This was a UGC which is user generated content. It's basically when you film some content at home and sell it to them I try to be careful about these. I'll tell you more about it in the future because I'm making like a video about it. It's been so hard to eat healthy lately and the cooking takes so much time not to mention the cleaning that comes after. My doctor recommended the Mediterranean diet and it was totally overwhelming at first. I thought the suggestion was fine you can hear some typing in the background as well as a big fan outside of the window but it's UGC so maybe I could have done it a little bit better. I didn't get hired for this. These lines or lines that they gave me they also gave me the note of be flexible with it be as natural as you can so that was my attempt at that and they did get tell me to do it vertically which is why it is vertical. This one is another one from my agency or almost done. Something that I would do if I knew I could not fail is have kids because that sounds like the most difficult thing that you could ever do. I'm very afraid of not being a good enough parent or not taking care of them properly giving them too much and then they become spoiled people so that's what I would do because in my life I'm pretty adventurous. I go for things that I really want without being too afraid of failing and that's the one thing that I truly would do if I knew I would be a good parent. I would have kids maybe two or four. I forgot about this one. I feel super vulnerable for saying that and I'm usually okay with being vulnerable but that makes me feel really uncomfortable. I didn't book that one and I'm realizing now that I'm watching these that I got a lot of like personality auditions of just like talk and be yourself. This is the job that I booked and I did show this audition in my last vlog last week and I took you guys through the whole thing so if you haven't watched that you can go and do that but I took it from getting a notification that I was cast and then every little thing I did replying to specific emails sending in photos on set I showed it all so we can watch some of this but this is um or we'll go ahead and just watch the entire thing. This audition booked me a commercial. The directions for this by the way is that you have a broken ankle you're in bed and then that you see and then you see that your daughter brought you breakfast in bed for the first time. Again mom did I audition for anything that wasn't a mom? Thank you. Hi my name is Benjika Rodriguez. I wanted them to see my um like my figure and since I have PJs on I was like let me do a different outfit that maybe is like mom at work or something um so that's why I put this full body shot in there but I thought it was pretty good. There was a little bit of background noise but it wasn't you know terrible it's just something that I can improve in the future by maybe using a better mic even though I was already using a mic I can maybe use a better one um but aside from booking that one I did have a direct booking for two student projects so I booked a total of three auditions and there's the fan. Before you ever sign up for a casting website please do research and not just my videos do a bunch of research and make sure the reviews aren't just coming from that company. Here's a video I made of a bunch of casting websites and who I would recommend it for based on your budget where you are in your career and where you are physically.