Ashley. Sham! Yes! Ah! Ha ha ha ha ha! Let me just be honest and say that this conversation kind of terrifies me. And today we're talking about rape. It terrifies me because I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing. It terrifies me because I have my own unprocessed experience and it terrifies me because I am afraid of opening myself up for other people to share their experiences. And for me not being in a place where I know how to respond appropriately, or that I don't necessarily even want to be a sound board for so much pain and grief. And so for that reason, I very rarely talk about this. If somebody talks about sex and intimacy for a living, this is just a topic that I refer a lot out to. And I will have some experts on here who I referred to at the end of this episode because I think that there's incredible minds who are just beautiful people who devote so much and have given themselves over to learning how to manage a particular kind of pain that is so relatable, but so difficult to talk about and to find spaces where you can talk about them. So I just wanna say the reason I felt compelled when you said this, and let me just backtrack. I talk on this podcast about intimacy and every guest that we have, I say the interviews are the best when it's a topic that you really care about. And this was the topic that you said was really important to you. Why? I think because we know that sexual assault is a lot more common than any representation in media or news would indicate. We know that it's very, very common. And because we know that it's common and it happens to all kinds of people in different situations, I think we should be open to having conversations about what the aftermath of that kind of violation does and or can do to a person's intimate experience. I think we've seen it go one or two ways in a lot of our representation, which is that a violation of a sexual nature causes a person to either shut down when it comes to intimate experiences or it causes them to become wildly promiscuous in a way that is destructive because they are doing it without intention or without any real care for themselves. There are other options. There are other ways. There are more ways than those two ways for this situation to turn out.  And I thought those were like the sanctioned victim reactions and I'm glad to have found out that that wasn't true and that that wasn't the case. So I wanna talk about it because there is a chance somebody out there needs to know that this isn't the case.  And I don't know why those four words never occurred to me or I've never come across them. And again, in full disclosure, I would say that I probably don't lean into literature or education in this realm that are around non-consensual experiences. So maybe that's just a me thing. I'm not saying that that's the common experience, but I had never heard anybody say that before or never heard it put that way before. Can you tell me about those four words? Absolutely.  And that messes up a lot for a young woman, for a 14 year old girl who is also being raised in purity culture, believing that what had happened to me had not just been a crime or a violation against my body, that it had taken my ability to say yes to sex, that it had taken that from me. That my first time having sex, which was supposed to be this very precious thing about my body, that choice was now gone and there was no getting it back and there was no option for seeing it any other way from any other perspective. When I realized that what had happened to me was not sex, not only was it freeing for me from an emotional standpoint, but it also put into perspective the fact that my virginity was considered a commodity. And I had to think about that. Is my virginity a commodity? Am I less valuable without it? And it took a really long time for me not only to understand that, A, whatever virginity was, I had not lost it in that moment. That's not something that somebody can take from you. And B, that what had happened to me, the definition of what had happened to me was simply rape, not for sex, not non-consensual sex, it was rape and that is separate from sex. And I wish, oh my God, I wish that anybody in the whole world had told me that before it happened. I wish that anybody in the whole world had told me that if it happened to me that what was to blame was not my budding sexuality or my blossoming body, that it was just a decision that someone else made to be violent.  And with that conversation comes the dialogue about your dad as a sexual assaulter and your knowledge that that has to come together but still being brave enough to stand up and say this is a topic that I wanna talk about is really cool. Thank you. Why did you decide to do that?  And I process through talking about things and through writing about things.  How would that be possible? It's not possible. So why don't we ever hear anything from those people?  Why don't we talk about it? And I realized we didn't talk about it because we felt like being related to someone who did something like that said something about you. If you have a parent or a sibling or a cousin, an uncle, a friend who does something like that and they go to prison and they are being held accountable, you are supposed to pretend that person doesn't exist and you are definitely supposed to pretend that you don't think about, care about or care for that person anymore. And that was not my reality. And I knew that that didn't mean something was wrong with me eventually. I knew that my capacity to love and care for my father, even as I knew I could not forgive him for his transgressions didn't mean that something was wrong with me or that I had done something wrong. Welcome, Jim and Ika. I am so excited to have you because you're calm. Thank you.  And before we press record, I was like, what are the right questions? What are the wrong questions? What are this? And you're like, hey, just whatever you wanna ask is totally fine. And you said I'm completely comfortable answering whatever it is that you wanna talk about when we press record. Yeah. So let's break into this. You listened to the Ashley Seaford interview. I did. I would love to hear your reflections on that. And if you're comfortable giving people some jump off points if they had reflections on that, how do they start conversations within their given toolbox right now? Yeah, I love the conversation. I think the conversation, one for me, being a survivor or a victim because language and also having a parent that caused harm to others, that's a mindset and trigger warning because I would love to drop those. I was in the room when my mother was murdered by my sperm donor. So this is why I say I'm a child of trauma because that is the first thing that moved me through. And even being like, I'm so sorry. Yeah, I was just telling your sister, I was like, this is so, it's like a bio thing now. Like I'm like, here's my bio.  It's a detail that structured my movement to get me here, right? Like, is it sad? Yes, if I was older, would I have been more affected? Probably, I was one. But hearing her talk about asking him why and he was like, it was a choice. I was like, ooh. But what I loved about the interview, it was very honest and also it hit on the sexual side of things. Yes. And I love talking about that in the sense of people are like, how are you okay? I'm like, stop talking to survivors in this drop voice. I'm like, we're still people, we're still sexual beings. And also like the way we look at sex, may it have changed? Yes, may it not have?  But also that's not everyone's narrative. So I think that conversation was beautiful to like open up because people don't talk about it. I mean, people don't talk about trauma in general. And then the vulnerable, anytime I hear someone's vulnerability of sharing their story, because you never know how it's gonna land. And also vulnerability is just scary because you never know how it's gonna land and or how people will try to use it against you. Because that's what we see, right? Like when people are like, I was raped, were you? But well, let's ask and I'm like, one to 2% of people lie. It's not a fun thing to just wake up and be like, you know what, today I'm gonna ruin someone's life and say I was assaulted. Like, no, because it's not just about that person. Now this is your life, your name is all over it. Love is in friends, love is in friends. I'm gonna take you on a trip, baby, I don't pretend, I said, love is in friends, oh. I'm gonna hold you down down to the end, I said.


All right, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this month's non-farm payrolls webinar on Friday the 6th of March. Colin Szydinski and myself, I look forward to hosting you for the next half an hour and hopefully navigating the non-farm payrolls numbers which are due out in around about 15 minutes from now. First and foremost we're going to have to do the obligatory risk warning with respect to the webinar for Canada jurisdiction in the UK and Ireland and once we've got that out of the way we can pretty much crack on. One thing that I would say ladies and gentlemen is that due to the bad weather in the US don't laugh but the numbers may be slightly late, they may be slightly delayed, they may not come out at 1.30 on the dot. Welcome Colin, I can hear you crushing around in the background there. So Colin Szydinski my colleague in Toronto has just joined us, say hi Colin. Hi everybody. And as I say Colin and I will be basically taking you through the numbers and let's first and foremost show you and talk a little bit about what we're expecting. So bringing up the Bloomberg first and foremost to give you an indication of the numbers that we're expecting, I'm just going to scroll down there. As you can see there the top line there US payrolls data face delay as weather hinders the DC opening. So I think the general consensus is we'll get them but we may get them in a sort of three or four minute window after 1.30 which should make for a particularly interesting data release. The weather has been positively awful this week on the East Coast. They've been, New York has been shut down and yesterday when plane went off the runway at LaGuardia and it's just been crazy. They've had really, really bad weather all over the East Coast again. It's been a wrap. That's one thing. About the whole month has been, there's been a lot of storms on the East Coast this month. Which brings us back to the payrolls numbers because if we look at what the payrolls numbers were a year ago and that's basically down here, this column here, column C, in January and February and December they were 84166 and 188 and we know from a year ago that the weather did have a significant downward effect on the payrolls numbers. I think more importantly than that the revisions that we saw last month were very, very positive and I think one part of why I think investors are so positive about the U.S. economy I think is largely because of how resilient I think the U.S. labor market looks if we look at the November number that was 423,000 jobs and then we got 329 in December and 257 in January. What we've got here is a slight difference of opinion between Colin and myself about what to expect with respect to today's numbers. Now we got some ADP yesterday and the ADP column is in column B here and we also saw a significant amount of revisions to those numbers after the data release earlier this week and again we've had a significant downward move from the 284 that we saw in November down towards 212 over the course of the last few months. So it does appear to be a little bit of a direction of travel here with respect to the payrolls numbers. Now that's not to say that we're going to get a disappointing number today but the expectation is we're going to get a number in and around 240 now. My hit record in terms of predicting non-farm payrolls numbers hasn't been particularly great of late so I'll admit that but when you actually look at the weather and you also look at the fact that we've had some concerns about the effects of the decline in the oil price as had on the oil sector, the oil and gas sector in the US, you've got to think that some point along the lines that will start to trickle down into the payrolls numbers. So Colin why don't you go ahead and basically tell the clients what you think is going to happen and then I'll follow it up with what I think and I would suspect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yes indeed because Michael is in around 190 and I'm around 240 and the reason I've gone a little more bullish this time, those of you that were with us last month will remember that I had gone quite bearish on concerns about layoffs in the oil patch and I ended up being way off and quite wrong so I decided okay well I decided this month I'm going a little bit more bullish with a 240,000 increase gas which is slightly above the street at 235. I'm also looking at a 20k upward revision to last month to around 275. So I'm thinking that we still might have some positivity in the numbers however I've also been telling everyone that I do think the risk to this month is to the downside, the sweet spot remains 200 to 250k and that's been the case for pretty much the last year now and we've seen the numbers in there for at least the headline numbers for most of that. The reasons I do think that you could see the amiss on that where it comes in lower certainly number one would be the oil patch and number two in addition not just in terms of the drilling activity but also there's been refinery and strikes in the United States which actually have pushed up the gasoline prices now that there's working its way through the system in the last week or so and Michael has another number of other reasons to suggest that the risks are to the downside this month. Yeah I mean obviously weather affects the side. There's also the fact that there was a port strike as well on the West Coast and that could well have impacted the payrolls numbers in February and you know notwithstanding the fact we've also seen weekly jobless claims start to edge higher again. Certainly if you look back over the course of the last few months I think it's been very rare that we've seen numbers above 300,000 yeah over the last three of the last four weeks we've seen numbers come in above 300,000. Now generally you know but generally there is a little bit of a correlation between the jobless claims as they go up generally the payrolls go down but I don't think it's any coincidence that while we've had sub 300 jobless claims that the US payroll numbers have been so good so the fact that we're back above 300,000 and have been so on a fairly regular basis does really beg the question as to whether or not payrolls growth will be as robust as we think that it is. So you know from my point of view I certainly think there's room for disappointment and I also think that there is potential for a little bit of a downside disappointment. A significant rebound in the dollar or a push higher in the dollar over the course of the last few trading sessions with the euro dollar at 11 and a half year lows, cable at its lowest levels for nearly two years and I think as a result of that maybe a good number is already priced in. So with that in mind let's look at some of the key support levels on cable and euro dollar and look at some of the key resistance levels on obviously dollar majors like dollar yen. Also have a look at Aussie dollar Canada, Aussie dollar, Canadian dollar but let's start off with the S&P 500. Now this is a four hour chart that I'm looking at here and you know the US market does appear to be looking a little top heavy. Certainly there's good support around about 2084, 2085 certainly on the basis of that chart there which I think suggests that maybe there is potential for a little bit of ebbing momentum. Now that's a four hour chart if we go to the daily chart that also gives us a little bit of an idea as well. We've got a rounded top coming in here. I mean I think there is a little bit of concern. I think the long shadows here suggest that there's good demand because we're not closing anywhere near the lows. That being said you know will a very positive number actually push the stock market lower? Will a negative number, a negative number is below 200,000 actually perversely push the market up and I think this is really what we've got to get our heads around. What will a positive number do i.e. 250, 260? Well that could actually potentially push stock market lower, push the dollar higher. Negative number that actually could push the stock market higher and actually push the dollar lower because it will keep the Fed on the back foot potentially or away from a rate hike. So I don't know whether there's anything you want to add Colin with respect to the narrative that I've just outlined there I think you've got definitely on that the response from the market. I think you're absolutely right. The other thing I note with this a couple of things in the end the Dow chart looks pretty much similar and in the NASDAQ's leveling off two things. First of all if you had looked at the Dow and the DAX yesterday and you all-time high for the DAX did not see it in the Dow. Second thing was if you look back knowing you're seeing a bit of a rounded top here but you had breakouts to new highs by the Dow and the S&P and they're not very enthusiastic. The S&P got through 2100, it only got to 2120 and then it started faltering. You're not seeing this huge push higher in the markets even when you've gotten new high and people are still kind of cautious about it. So it wouldn't take much necessarily to spark a bit of a correction here. Not a massive one but you could see a few percent pullback. Yeah I also think the stronger dollar could actually hurt US stocks more than anything else and I think that's why yesterday we saw the German DAX push higher so significantly. I think because the Euro weekend and obviously a weaker Euro is good for European stocks because it makes exports cheaper and at the end of the day the German DAX is probably going to be the biggest beneficiary of that. It's already up to day on the back of this so I think really with respect to European markets I think the key drivers go on. You go ahead finish that and then I'll mention something. I was going to say the key driver is probably going to be what the Euro does with respect to what the DAX does and obviously keeping an eye on the average earnings numbers as well because we did see a spike last month and I don't know whether you want to go into that. Yeah what I did want to mention was actually looking at earnings and I was just saying the US earnings season, one of the takeaways related to the dollar was companies were starting to complain about the higher US dollar and crimping guidance based on foreign exchange. Now if we're coming up to, we're coming up on 8.30 here. We want to mention the average hourly earnings. I'll just speak to that for a second. So if we're looking at, if we go in the scene that there's layoffs in the oil patch something we've got to notice, those are really high paying jobs. Those are not part-time jobs. Those are jobs that are paying $80,000 a year like they're serious money that's being, that jobs that people are losing. So if that's the case that should drag on average earnings. So if you start to, you would expect the average earnings to probably get back to two or even under two based on that, on the loss of high paying jobs. So if you don't get that, it would suggest that you are still seeing some pretty strong wage inflation in the US. There's also the additional factor. I think the, the spike that we saw in January was as a large result of 23 US states bumping up their minimum wage by in excess of 10%. It was a good number and actually some US states bump their minimum wage up by around about 21, 22%. So that will be reflected in the average earnings numbers. And I said at the time, yeah, it was dollar bullish, but, you know, is it a one-off? We have also had Walmart talk about raising their average earnings and putting all their staff on the minimum wage as well. So certainly in the short term that's going to be positive wage growth but these are all low paid jobs. So, you know, we've seen a significant rebound in the labor market but we haven't seen a significant rebound in US retail sales. And this is something that I really, really want to sort of bring to your mind. If you look at the retail sales numbers that we've seen over the past two months in column D here, we've seen a contraction of 1.7%. So we've got US retail sales numbers next week on Thursday. So again, you know, even though we're getting all these new jobs, US consumers aren't going out to the shops. They're not spending money and they're not spending money. What they're doing is they're building up their savings. Personal spending slipped back for the second month in a row. So we've got a lower oil price. We've got lower gas prices. We've got more jobs and yet retail sales are slipping back. So there's something not quite right in the US economy and I'm not sure what it is. And that makes me worry about the fact that people are talking about a Fed rate hike in June. There's another factor. If everyone else is cutting rates, why would the Fed raise rates, make the dollar even less competitive than it already is? You know, it would strike me as a little bit strange. The fact that the Fed seems to think that the deflation forces that are affecting China, that are affecting Japan, that are affecting Europe and also affecting the UK. Inflation expectations here in the UK are at their lowest levels for quite some time. So, you know, when you consider all of that, I just can't help worrying that the market is two-one-way on the dollar. That being said, you can't go against the herd and I think that's really the big question going forward. You've really got to go with the trend until such time, but you've got to be nimble and you've got to be ready to get out as soon as possible. Now, the key levels on cable is 151.30. I quickly want to show you that because there's a good support level there, but it also targets our head and shoulders breakout target that we saw in my video earlier this week. So, let's get ready to rumble here. The numbers should be coming out sometime in the next few minutes. So, we've got, I don't know, they could be late. We just need to remember they could be late because of the data, so they're due. We're waiting. Is it going to be a negative dollar number or a positive dollar number? At the moment, my Bloomberg's not updating. Neither is our platform and that's because, sorry, the BLS website is temporarily unavailable. That's useful because everyone's trying to hit it at the same time. So, we're still waiting.  So, we're not getting the data because it actually hasn't been released to Bloomberg yet. And I'll just keep talking about it. The trade balance is out. The trade figures are out. A deficit of $41.8 billion. That's pretty much in line with expectations. We're expecting a deficit of $41.1. So, that's slightly worse than expected, but that's not really the number that we want to hear. Is it? It's the payroll's numbers and we are still waiting for them from Bloomberg. They still haven't been released. While we're waiting, the Canadian trade balance is also at this morning, negative 2.4 billion deficit versus street had been expecting $1 billion deficit. So, it is a little bit worse than the street expected. We're still waiting for Bloomberg as you can see here. Right, February payrolls. I've just seen someone tweet it. It's $295. I don't know whether that's true or not. I'm hearing $295. Yeah, there it is. $295. Yeah, it's just come out. So, we've got $295. $239 revision lower. So, I was way wrong by $100,000 on that. It doesn't look like the oil sector has affected it in any way, shape or form. $5.5, the unemployment rate has come down slightly. Let's look at the participation rate to see whether or not that's reflected in the participation rate. I'm still waiting for the average earnings numbers because it's the average earnings numbers that we're particularly interested in at this point in time. I'm still waiting for them. $5.5 still. So, Euro dollars going to carry on towards $108 at this rate unless we get a disappointing average earnings number. So, certainly the key support on the cable is, as I said earlier, it's $151.30. Still waiting for the average earnings numbers. That's dropped to 2%. That's dropped back to 2%. So, actually, that is worse than expected. So, on a monthly basis, we've seen 0.1. So, actually, average early earnings have slipped back.  Let's look at the key support levels and resistance levels on the various markets. So, we've got the pound against the dollar around $151.30. The trend line from the lows that we saw earlier this month is going to act as a fairly key support level down here as well as our head and shoulders breakout target from here around about $151.30. So, key support there on the cable, looking at Euro dollar, we've got just below $109 at the moment. Let's blow that out slightly further and see whether or not we can find the next support level on that. And it's probably going to be around these twin lows that we saw in 2003. Let me see if I can attach that to that. $107.94, those twin lows there. So, you've got to think that the market is going to want to have a crack at that over the course of the next few trading sessions. We're pretty much there at the moment, but we need to stay below $110, $111 to do that. And obviously, this is the monthly performance on Euro dollar. And this is an absolutely historic move lower on Euro dollar on this particular timeframe. And we do appear to have broken out. And that looks like a little flag there. So, certainly, there's potential for us to move an awful lot lower on Euro dollar. Dolly Yen is probably going to have a crack at that $120.60 level that's capped the rally that we saw a few weeks ago. So, again, keep an eye on that. And then we've got $120.80, which was the December highs, as well as the $120.85 highs that we saw at the beginning of December as well. So, we're approaching some very key levels on Dolly Yen on the top side. Have we got the momentum to take that higher? Those average earnings numbers would suggest to me that the Fed's not going to be any hurry to drop that patience language at its March meeting, which I think is due in a couple of weeks' time. Yes, it is. I think it's the 17th or 18th. You know, it's the 18th. Yes, so, you know, for me, given what Mr. Dudley, no, Mr. Evans, Charles Evans said earlier this week, he is one of the most dovish voting members of the FOMC. He's suggesting that rate rises won't – he doesn't want rate rise to happen this year, the earliest 2016. Now, he is probably one of the more dovish members of the committee. But the fact is, unless we get some significant wage growth, then I would argue that irrespective of these numbers here, it's going to make it very difficult for the Fed to actually look to raise rates. And yes, the unemployment rate did drop to 5.5%, but the participation rate dropped to 62.8%. So I wouldn't worry too much about the participation rate in that respect because it's generally reflected in the drop in the unemployment numbers because the unemployment numbers only look at people who've been actually looking for work less than a year. I think that's right, isn't it Colin? I think so. Yeah. And actually, if you look at the U6 unemployment rate, that actually doesn't paint as pretty – as positive a story. I think someone's just tweeted something along the lines of the U6 under-employment rate rose to 13.1% from 12%. That's the under-employment rate. So again, while the headline rate may look particularly good, the under-employment rate would seem to suggest that it's going to be very, very difficult for the Fed to even consider tightening policy if you've got a very, very low participation rate. So, right. So let's look at some of the other key levels. You wanted to talk about dollar CAD, didn't you Colin? Yes, let's take a look at that. So we had dollar CAD has been forming a big descending triangle here. It is going back up a little bit, but it's still been contained within the resistance line of that triangle. And so you've got two things weighing on pushing that up to that. One is the U.S. dollar rally. The other is the worst unexpected Canadian trade deficit. I talked about a couple of minutes ago. But basically, the other piece this week, though, was that the Bank of Canada did not raise interest rates and people thought they were. So overall, the Looney here is still looking top. It still looks like this is a top forming here based forming in CAD U.S. dollar. Cool. Okay. So basically, we're looking at $123.50 on the downside. We're looking around $126. Give or take. Yeah, about $126 on the top side. So certainly we're not too far away from the $126 level. And given how positive those dollar numbers are, the move higher in dollar Canada is not what I would suggest particularly stellar. Obviously that's very negative for gold. So that's those numbers. And we've broken below that trend line that I drew in from the lows in October, which is another negative in terms of the overall direction of travel with respect to gold. And the likelihood is that we could well retest the lows that we saw at the beginning of this year or the end of last year around the power. Sorry, Michael. Gold was going back and forth in the earlier part of this week. It tried to break out then it tried to break down and it was a bit of indecision there. But now it looks like this has definitely been decided to the downside here with this breakdown. And you look at the stochastics and the momentum is trending lower. So it does look like your gold has resolved this dispute here with the bears taking hold of it. That looks fairly conclusive, that break. So I think there's certainly potential for us to move to that next support level that we drew in from the lows at the beginning of January, the end of December there. That spike low there. So certainly worth keeping an eye on that over the course of the next few sessions. Crude oil. Let's look at WTI. They're continuing to diverge. Brent crude. This is a range play for me at the moment. Certainly you can see it being played out on the four hour chart here. Given how far we've declined there's certainly significant resistance around about $62 a barrel on the Brent contract. There's good support around about $56. You can certainly draw a trend line on this chart here around about $59.50 on that move there. A bit of a continuation pattern perhaps of this up move here. So maybe there's potential for Brent crude to break higher over the course of the next few trading sessions. WTI is fairly similar, albeit at lower levels again. It's a similar sort of box range that we've been in since the beginning of February with once again $54 on the top side $47 on the downside but we are trading in a nice up channel there actually. Let's draw that in to give you an indication of where the boundaries are. I'll just draw that there. It's holding at the moment but certainly if you look at that, that's quite steep. If it does break then I would imagine it will probably test these twin lows around about $49 a barrel. That is quite a steep uptrend. The key question is whether or not it's sustainable at the moment but as I say, we've had a very strong number but I would caveat the strong number with those concerns that I have about the participation rate dropping, the under employment rate going up, the U6 under employment rate going up and obviously the decline or the slightly worth and expected average earnings numbers given the fact that core inflation still remains well below 2%. I think that's really what you've got to look forward, look ahead to. While we may get the dollar look test higher today in the interim, there still remain significant doubts about whether the Fed will be able to consider easing monetary policy in June. Being asked about silver, more than happy to talk about silver, I'll just reiterate what I was saying earlier about asking questions. David, you need to use the chat facility. I would just say ask questions here so that you know where to ask questions. Dolly N. will rally on a strong dollar number. I've just been asked about that but we need to break out through 12080 to target 12085. If we get a break through 12085 then certainly I think we can retest the highs. Certainly that's the direction of travel. The dollar will remain strong and we'll certainly want to test higher today because that's where the momentum trade is. But next week we may find that some of those gains get given up. As regards to silver, it's pretty much a proxy for gold so what you'll get is I think a retest of these series of lows in December. Let me draw that in for you. Around about 1553. Now that we've broken below the February lows that's going to kick out a few stops and we'll probably test down towards these lows here. On the back of that, with respect to the S&P 500 what I was saying previously still holds true. Strong dollar is bad for it so while the euro is going lower and continues to test lower you'll probably see European stocks go higher but the Dow Jones will struggle to rally. For me these numbers have a dual purpose. They're positive for the DAX and European equities so they're not so good for the Dow and the S&P. We're looking at the Dow and the S&P both pretty much flat. The S&P is still sitting almost right on 2100 and the Dow at 18125. It's been trading in an 18,000 even to about 18300 range so it's just kind of sitting sloppy in the middle of that. The US indices look like they're not really doing much. In terms of the upside despite the rally in Europe? With respect to the DAX there's certainly potential to go quite a bit higher. There's nothing to stop it while the euro drops or continues to fall. If you see euro dollar at 108 the next target is 105. The lower the euro goes the more positive that is for European equity markets so there's no reason to think we can't see 12,000. Over the next two or three months how we get there is another matter but I wouldn't want to see a move back below 11,500 on the German DAX in the short to medium term because if we do we could get a sharp correction lower. Certainly I think what's happening with respect to Greece is going to be a factor going forward with respect to European equities. There is a euro group meeting on Monday. I know that they're going to be talking about these proposals that Mr Sipras has put towards the EU commission and they will be talking about them and any concerns about Greece leaving the euro zone will help push European markets or keep a cap on European markets but what I don't think it will do is will undermine the upward momentum that we've been seeing over the course of the last few weeks and months. So going forward I would expect to lower euro to continue to underpin European equity markets while at the same time actually hindering US markets. So it was interesting to note that before those jobs numbers came out the S&P was trading at 2101 is now at 2095. So that tells me all I need to know about the direction of travel for US equities. A strong dollar is not something that US equities are going to like. We've seen a great run on US equity markets. The key support level as I said just before the numbers came out is around 2084. We tested that a couple of days ago. I've seen a reason why we can't test that again while we're below 2100, 2105. Why that number? Because essentially it's the highs of the last couple of days. 2104 today and 2105 yesterday. So beware of a short squeeze on the S&P. The market likes to do that as we head into the weekend. But overall I think what we will determine where the S&P goes next is how it reacts around 2084 if it gets there. So as far as today is concerned it's a negative US equity market picture but it's fairly positive from a European equity market point of view. A nice bit of divergence there and I think we're going to continue to see that over the course of the next few sessions. It's also going to be very interesting to see actually how the US bond market has actually reacted to those numbers. I'm just going to have a quick look at the US 10 year which is down here. We've seen a quick, we've seen a sharp move in the prices which is not surprising. Below the trend line support that we saw in September and we've seen a five basis point jump in yields from 211% to 216%. So certainly that explains why the dollar is so strong today because of the fact that US Treasury yields have jumped quite sharply in expectation of some form of rate hike by the Fed sometime this year. But as I say, the headline numbers are good. The internals probably not so good but the internals will start to play out next week. Okay, does anyone else have any more questions? I've asked about the DAX. Are you okay with my comments on the DAX ladies and gents? With respect to that, weak euro should be fairly positive for the DAX. Strong dollar, not particularly great for the S&P 500. If that's pretty much it, brilliant. Okay, we are recording this so at any time you want to basically go back and re-listen to any of the comments, please feel free to do so. Next week, Colin and I will be hosting another event. I think it's next week. Is it next week, Colin? It's next week, that's because I'm off next week. That's right, you're off next week, that's right. Okay, so in a couple of weeks time, Wednesday actually, UK Budget Day, you and I will be hosting, co-hosting an event, basically covering some of that and talking about what to expect from the pound and the UK Guild Market and the FTSE 100 over the next few weeks and months and the lead up to the election. Until then, unless anyone else has any other questions, I'd like to thank you all for listening. Sorry about the delayed nature of the economic data, but unfortunately that was down to factors outside of our control. I hope you enjoyed this monthly webinar and hopefully you'll attend next month at around about the same time. Actually, are we actually in next month? Because I know it's Easter, isn't it? The US is on the second, I believe, or whatever day that is. The first Friday is before Easter. We'll sort out the dates with respect to that at the time, but otherwise, thanks very much everyone and look forward to speaking to you at our next event. Thanks everyone, have a great day trading.


And here's the facts. I think all of you know we are living in a time where everybody here knows as a result of this disastrous campaign financed decision by the Supreme Court on Citizens United. You all know about that? The worst decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. And what that decision basically says is that one of these people in this country, okay, you've got to vote. You've got one vote. But billionaires get a vote, plus the fact they can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who represent the wealthy and the powerful. We have a situation where one family, the second wealthiest family in America, the co-brothers are going to spend $900 million on this election. $900 million. That is more money than either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is going to spend. Does that sound like democracy to you? It is a movement toward oligarchy. And you and I together are going to overturn Citizens United. To a public funding of elections for anybody.  You can run on the merits of your ideas, and I have to beg money for millionaires and billionaires. How's that? What this campaign is about, it really is not complicated. What this campaign is about is people, I think all over Iowa, all over America, basically saying, enough is enough. This great country of ours and our government belong to all of us and not just a handful of billionaires. That's what it's about. The ranking member, that means leader of the opposition on the Senate Budget Committee. I represent the Democrats, lead the Democrats on the Budget Committee. And here's what the Republican budget was about that passed the Congress. They controlled the Senate. They controlled ours. So you tell me, if anybody you know, whether they're Republican, by the way, or Democrat, thinks that this makes sense. At a time when 35 million Americans have no health insurance, they decided to repeal the Affordable Care Act, cut Medicaid by billions, with the result that 27 million more Americans lose their health insurance. Now, most of us think that healthcare is a right of all people. We want everybody to have coverage. We are the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee healthcare to all people. Now, what these guys did is throw 27 million more Americans off the health insurance.  Everybody knows that. Of course, the college's very hard. We have presented an idea and introduced legislation that will make public colleges and universities tuition-free. In addition, substantially lower interest rates for those millions of Americans who are carrying student debt. That's out of you. Their view in their budget was to cut, this is true, cut $90 billion from Pell Grants over a 10-year period. Furthermore, in Iowa, in Vermont, all over this country, we have folks who are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. And because the wages they're earning are so low, they are not earning enough money to literally feed their families. I was in Des Moines a couple of months ago. I was at the farmers' market. And I spoke to a guy who works with the church or organization. And his job was to collect the food that was not sold at the farmers' market. And he brought it to an emergency food chef. And I asked him, what percentage of the people who go to the emergency food chef in Des Moines are working people? He said, 90% of them. So you have people all over this country who are working hard but their wages are so low, they can't even afford to feed their families. And all the Republican budget did cut billions of dollars from nutrition programs, which will increase hunger among the children and among the elderly in America. Those are not the priorities that the American people want or deserve. Now, these guys, the people who fund the Republicans, they got a whole lot of money. Let's be very clear about it. They have endless amounts of money. And I cannot begin to explain to you, as I work in Washington, D.C., the power of money over the political process. The American people want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Democrats do, Republicans do. And that's why we're going to fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage. People, every poll that I have seen, people say that if you work 40 hours a week, you should not be living in poverty. We can't get that bill on the floor because it's a big money interest. They don't know, we don't want to raise the minimum wage. In fact, many Republicans support doing the way with the concept of the minimum wage. That's a Koch Brothers principle. So in a high unemployment area, you can pay workers three or four bucks an hour because they're desperate enough to have to work for pennies. And that's their vision of America. Many of my Republican colleagues are going around Iowa and they're talking about the need to cut social security, cut social security, cut benefits for veterans. My view is that when you have all over your state, all over my state, all over America, millions of seniors who are barely making it on 12, $13,000 a year. Try to think about it for a moment. What it's like to be 75, 80, 85 years of age living on $13,000 a year. How do you heat your home in the winter? How do you buy the medicine that you need? How do you buy the food you need? You don't. They don't. They don't buy the food they need. They don't buy the medicine they need. And these guys want to cut social security, but at the same time in their budget, they proposed over $250 billion in tax breaks for the top two tenths of one percent, the millionaires and billionaires. So that's what this campaign is about. It's a campaign over national priorities and over values. And what we believe is that our government should be working for the middle class and working families of this country, not just for the billionaires. They have the money. You're looking at the only, one of the very few candidates for president that does not have a super pack. All right. I don't represent corporate America. I don't represent billionaires. I don't want their money. The way we are going to win this campaign is what this event is today about. This is just extraordinary to see so many people coming out here today. We need your help. And let me be very clear and tell you what no other candidate for president will tell you. Yes, of course, I want your support to help me win here in Iowa and help me become the next president of the United States. Yes, I do jump. But what I will tell you, what nobody else will tell you, is no president, not Bernie Sanders or anybody else, can transform America and do what needs to be done for working families and lowering income people and the elderly and the sick and the children. No president, not the best that you can imagine, can do it unless we have millions of Americans involved in a strong grassroots movement. And the reason for that is that you got folks in Washington who have unlimited amounts of money and power. And they said, well, President Sanders, you want public colleges and universities to be tuition free. Well, they won't allow that to happen.  And we will raise the minimum wage of $15 an hour, not because I think it's a great idea, but because we have people all over this country saying we will not continue to work for salvation wages. We are going to raise the minimum wage. Look, all of you have studied history, understand that change, real change, whether it is the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay movement, the environmental movement, whatever it may be, real change never comes because some guy sitting in the old school office or someplace else says, oh gee, I think it's a good idea. That's not how change comes. Change only comes when millions of people stand up and fight back and demand their human rights. And that's what this campaign is about. So this campaign is not just about me. I need your help during the campaign. Yes, I do. But I will need your help the day after the election.  They're world corrupts. I'm not going to get involved. You tell them that the Koch brothers are prepared to spend $900 million on this campaign. Maybe they understand something that everybody in America should understand. Politics is real.  And if we do not get involved, they will control what goes on. So we need your help not just during the campaign, we need you after the campaign to be part of a strong dynamic grassroots movement which knows what's going on in Washington, which demands that Congress start representing ordinary Americans and not just billionaires. That's what this campaign is about. Thank you very much.


Carbapenum resistance among gram-negative pathogens is a major global public health problem that occurs through intrinsic or transferable genes and is widespread in certain regions, but not well documented in others. This article was authored by Francis S. Codjoe and Eric S. Doncor.


So my name is Shijjaz Abdullah. I'm a data center solution specialist, a cloud solution specialist at Microsoft based here in Qatar. My job at Microsoft is to help customers and partners build solutions on the cloud to make the cloud more useful for them and basically take advantage of the cloud and the power that it brings to achieve their business objectives. So today, I'm going to talk to you about Microsoft's cloud offerings. Basically, the Microsoft Azure platform. Azure is a cloud services platform from Microsoft, which helps customers do a variety of things, and some of these things we're going to discuss today. Basically, if you're here in this room, you probably have an idea. You have an idea to build something. You have an idea to start up something great. Most organizations interestingly today that are big in the cloud like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, they all started up as an idea. Somebody had an idea that they put to work. They began in the garage of somebody, and they ended up building these huge empires that are now cloud service providers. It's interesting to see how these providers can actually enable and fuel the growth of other startups. It's like a continuous life cycle, and it's interesting when you think of it that way. So basically, my agenda today or what I wanted to discuss with you today is to make you familiar with what Microsoft has to offer in the cloud space in general. And again, also look at why Microsoft, I mean why think of Microsoft when it comes to cloud, give you an overview of some of the offerings we have, and also some quick wins or some opportunity areas that you can apply further thought on and see how your ideas align with what we have to offer. Again, it has to remain generic when we, or general when we do these kind of presentations because everybody has a different idea, but we're gonna actually try to give you a fair amount of, fair understanding of what we have in Azure. So again, when we think of cloud computing and organizations, the traditional way of doing things, yes, we all agree that cloud is taking over and that's a new way of doing things, but again, the traditional way of doing things was to run everything in data centers. Organizations, government organizations, private organizations, startups, small organizations, big organizations, they all used to build data centers and they used to have a computer room or a closet where they used to have their servers in there, their applications in there, and they used to have a bunch of people who just manage the stuff. So everything that you see in blue over there, right from the hardware, the nuts and bolts, all the way to the application, we are actually managed and in some cases, even homegrown by the organization. Now, enter cloud computing, we have multiple different options that come up. So we have infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. Now, before we go ahead, I just want to take a quick survey. How many of us know something about the cloud? I mean, how many of us have heard about the cloud? How many of you are actually new to the cloud? You're just trying to understand what the cloud is and what it can bring. Okay, great. So basically, there's infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. When we say infrastructure as a service, we're talking about basically having a cloud service provider like Microsoft in this case, managing some amount of that infrastructure. Basically, the stuff that is hard to maintain and the nuts and bolts of the environment, the networking, the storage, the servers and stuff, that's managed by the vendor, Microsoft, and you focus on the things that actually enable your business, which is your applications and things, your customers, basically. We also have models like platform as a service where that line goes a bit higher, where even the runtime and the operating system and all that stuff is actually managed by the vendor, you just build the application and focus on that application that you need. For example, it might be a database, it might be a website, it might be something that's what you care about. The other stuff is totally taken care of by a vendor like Microsoft, and that is an SLA that this is backed with. So in the case of Microsoft, it can range between 99.9 to 99.95 or 99.9 percentage, depending upon the kind of service that you're offering. In terms of uptime SLA. And then you have the last model, which is the most convenient model to end customers, which is software as a service. Software as a service, basically, the whole stack is managed by the vendor. You just manage your users and control that access so that they can use the system. You focus on running the business. So examples of this could be Office 365, Google Mail for Enterprises, things like that. Examples of this could be something like a website hosting provider. They provide that platform for you. You manage your website, but don't worry about is my servers up and running? Is the middleware okay? Is the web server okay? I mean, the services are actually managed by us. An example of this could be something like Rackspace or even Azure, where you don't really worry about the hardware and the storage and all that stuff. Let me focus on the operating system and above. I've got a team of administrators who will actually manage that stuff, but I think below that, I don't want to be bothered about hardware and things like this. Microsoft provides solutions in all three areas. With Azure, we focus on the first two areas, and this is more like specific. If it's a collaboration and email and that kind of stuff, we have Office 365, we have CRM solutions, Customer Relationship Management solutions, we've got ERP solutions that are completely hosted in a data center and even completely maintained by us. You are just a tenant on that system and you just use it for your business. So we have all three models as Microsoft. Again, as you move towards the right, you have lesser control. Yes, it comes at an advantage that you don't have to manage things, you can focus on the business. But again, you have lesser control because you're not really controlling the entire stack. It's not in your data center, it's not at your doorstep. Again, as you move to the right, the ability to customize reduces because you're having a package solution here. It's built once for many tenants. So the ability to customize actually reduces, even though it brings a lot of benefits on efficiency, cost savings and all that stuff. Again, the cost also decreases, which is a good thing. One of the key drivers to move to the cloud is about cost. And the second thing is about efficiency. So they don't want to be in the business of managing IT. Your customers want to do their business. They're depending upon others to manage that piece for them. And that's where the benefit comes in. And plus the cost is actually much lesser. How does the cost go less?  If some other customer comes and they need lots of servers, of course the unit pricing goes down. So think of a company like Microsoft where we're running thousands of servers, tens of thousands of servers in each data center, we actually get a work up a better deal with those vendors. And we're passing that to you so the cost actually goes down. So where does Microsoft Azure live? Where does it come from? So Microsoft Azure is powered, as I said, it's a cloud service completely managed by Microsoft. It's powered by our data centers across the world. As of today, we have 19 different regions. A region can have multiple data centers. So there are 19 different regions from which we offer services to our customers around the world. And they're shown on the map here. India is coming up very soon, but the other regions we already have established data centers. Now each of these data centers are massive. I mean, a typical data center is the size of 10 football stadiums, right? They're huge structures and having tens of thousands of servers compute. We are like the ISP in that country. We have our own internet, we're not dependent on, and we actually build those data centers. Microsoft builds and runs those data centers. It's not outsourced, it's not sent to a vendor or something. Typically, the number of people managing those massive data centers are like five in number, including the electrician, right? So they're extremely less staff, it's very efficient ways in which we manage those data centers, and they're huge. And we also do data center tours and that kind of stuff and typically takes three hours to just walk around the data centers, just to have a look at the stuff. So that's the kind of structures that's the kind of data centers that we build and we offer a variety of services from these data centers to the world. So just to put this into figures, 57% of the Fortune 500 companies in the world are using Azure. There's more than 300,000 active websites that are hosted on Azure. Just to give you some idea of what Azure is. And then you have like more than a million SQL databases running on Azure, 30 trillion things stored in the storage in Azure, 3 million requests per second on the storage that's coming in, massive numbers if you look up from the IT world. More than 300 million people who actually have accounts or Azure Active Directory accounts, 21 billion authentications happening per week. This is massive stuff. And again, this is actually fueled as there's a continuous journey here and that's where startups and organizations come here. There's a steady stream of developers, startup organizations, big organizations who are actually developing solutions on top of Azure. Azure is a platform. Azure is what you make out of it. You can actually build a solution that you can take to a customer, it's running on Azure. But what you sell to the customer or what you have for the customer is your idea and your solution. And we are just providing you that platform that helps you realize that idea. So there's more than 1.65 million developers registered and they're building solutions on top of Azure. This could be like individual developers. Somebody who has a blog and a website, he's developing stuff on Azure. It could be somebody as big as companies like Riverbed and Barocoda developing firewalls to use on Azure. So it's very interesting to see where this is headed to. Now in terms of partners, in addition to the developers and all these people, there's a huge list of partners and growing who are actually building solutions on top of Azure.  They all want to, organizations, IT organizations know that they won't be relevant if they don't have solutions that run on the cloud. If I'm completely doing on-premises stuff, building stuff solutions that actually just run on-premises, my days are numbered because everything's moving to the cloud. The cost benefit, efficiency benefit, all that is too big and too massive to lose. It's an opportunity to lose if people are not doing things on the cloud. Be it customers, be it even solution providers or partners. So almost everybody you can think of is actually developing solutions for the cloud. And the other good thing about cloud is that the way in which innovations happen. Today, if you are buying a package software solution, be it from Microsoft, be it from anybody else, it comes with a set of features. Let's say, let's use the example of Windows. You had Windows XP, it had some features and then came Windows Vista with more features so you upgraded. But what was the gap? It was a couple of years before the new features could roll out and it keeps happening. Take that with any software solution, that's the case. But when you think of a cloud solution or cloud service that's available, feature rollouts are extremely fast. We roll out, we ship features every month. So the service that you see today is not the service that you will see in a month from now because there's new feature enhancements being rolled out. It becomes much easier because it is centrally hosted. It's managed by us. We support it, we build it, we manage it. We actually are able to bring features to our customers at a much faster rate. We're trickling features down into customers rather than waiting for the next big release. So you're having a continuous improvement of things. Just in 2014, we had all those services which we just released. These are major ones. I'm not talking about small features and stuff here and there. These are new services that we launched in Azure just in the past one year. So anybody who's got an Azure subscription here knows that they keep receiving those newsletters every two weeks and there's new features that's coming in ready for you to capitalize on and use and build. So when it comes to the economics of the cloud, why do your customers care about the cloud? Why should you care about the cloud? If you look at it, I mean, of course, cloud, there is private cloud and there's public cloud. Microsoft does both as far as Microsoft is concerned. Private cloud is cloud that you build in your own data center.  And that's a private cloud. You completely control that cloud but it doesn't give you the economics of benefit just like the public cloud because you're building it on your own. That is a capital expenditure. But again, it is a more efficient and more automated way of doing things. On the public cloud, on the other hand, it gives you much more agility. Now if you look at it, the sweet spot for cloud, any kind of cloud is actually in the small and medium business, the startups, the small organizations. They have limited money to spend for CAPEX. You don't want to make a huge investment right from day one. You want to start small. You want to pay as you grow. You want to pay as you go. And the cloud brings that. I need X amount of compute, X amount of few services. I have just five users right now when I started. Who knows? Maybe I'll grow into a multi-billion dollar business or I might just end up, you know, that is a risk as well. So it helps you to manage that risk and it also helps you to invest as you grow. So you move from this CAPEX model where I'm going to build this data center. I'm releasing this new service to my end customers. I'm a startup and this is an IT-based solution that I have for my end customers and this thing requires massive compute power. So I'm going to build a data center in Qatar and I'm going to bring all this hardware in here and I'm going to actually, of course that comes at a capital expenditure. You pay a lot of money upfront for something that you will realize the return, the ROI you're going to realize in the next four or five years, right? And you have to invest upfront. After four or five years, the hardware reaches end of life and you reinvest, you buy hardware again. You can get into that model or you can move into an operating expenditure model where you pay a small amount of money per minute or per hour of compute that you need. And that's what the cloud brings you, right? So most benefit, the most of the benefit actually comes in the smaller you are as an organization, the better the benefit for you. That doesn't mean the enterprises don't take benefit from the cloud. There are enterprises in Qatar and around the world who are actually taking advantage of the cloud for various use cases. Now what kind of workloads does the cloud make a lot of sense to? I'm just going to open up everything so that I can explain it much easier.  So your workloads most likely or your solution most likely comes into one of those areas. It might be an on and off thing, I mean where it works during some fixed period of time during the year. People usually tend to use this at this time of the year and that's the only time the solution works. Other times it's not needed. So or there might be components inside your solution which need to work only at certain specific times of the day or times of the month or the year for that matter. So that's an on and off kind of thing. Now why is the cloud good for this?  It's lying idle there. And you're actually in the cloud model, you're paying per minute for the servers. The moment you shut down a server you don't pay anything for it. The other thing is growing fast.  You want to pay as you grow. And that model is actually a very attractive, you know, pattern for cloud. Unpredictable bursting. You don't, you can't predict.  And at times it might be dull but you don't know when this is going to happen. And you know, when you have a lot of users signing up for your service, it's brand new. People are excited. You did some marketing campaign. People are excited. They come in, they go to your website.com and they start registering and start doing transactions. That's something that happens all of a sudden. And you don't want to actually have your website break when that happens. So you want to scale up but at the same time, when that spike dies, you want to scale down so that you don't pay more for that hardware and that infrastructure, right? And the cloud helps you do that. We have automatic scaling.  And then, you know, you did some publicity and then suddenly like a lot of people are coming to your website.  Then we actually automatically scale up so that you have more resources, your website doesn't die. And then when we find that the demand is subsiding, we actually reduce, you know, automatically. So you pay more when you use more and you pay less when you use less instead of sticking to one, you know, one configuration. Then you have predictable bursting. How did Amazon start? Amazon is one of our competitors today but I have a lot of respect for Amazon. How did Amazon start? We all know Amazon as the company that, you know, sells books and things and stuff and we all love to shop in Amazon. They get the most, which, let's take a guess. What time of the year do you think they have the most traffic on their website? December. December, you know, the holiday season. That's when people go out shopping for gifts and stuff like that. And they realize that, you know, I have predictable bursting. Every November, December, October onwards till Jan, I have a lot of, you know, a lot of traffic. And I want, if my system breaks at that time, I'm going to lose business, right? But at the same time, I don't want to really pay for all that, you know, all that compute throughout the year, just to handle the December spike. So they get into this model where, you know, I have predictable bursting at this time. But what do I do with the remaining compute? And that's how Amazon Web Services was born. They started selling that excess compute that they had for the rest of the year to small companies, you know, because they had the infrastructure in place. So that's how the business actually evolved in a way. So coming back to your model, you actually pay when you actually burst during those times. So probably if Amazon were a customer of Microsoft, they would pay more in December than they would pay in June, right? So you get that model. And of course you have the 24 by seven steady applications. But believe me, this is the smallest, if you walk into any data center or any, you know, customer here or anywhere in the world, these kind of workloads are the least.  Most workloads fall in those categories because systems are designed that way. You don't have something that does the same thing all over the, you know, all the time. So basically when you move into a cloud model, you're actually paying for what you're using. But whereas in a CAPEX model where you buy hardware and stuff like that, you're actually paying for the whole thing and you're probably not using. So this blue area is what you're saving, you know? And again, if you do economies of scale and if you're actually calculating costs, the costs are also very different because you're doing a CAPEX and you're doing AMCs. There isn't CAPEX and an OPEX for hardware that you buy. Whereas in this case, it's flatly moving into an OPEX model. You pay for what you're using. That's the Amazon, I mean, sort of example where in December you have this huge spike coming in. And again, when you think about Microsoft, Microsoft has changed a lot from what it used to be. When people think of Microsoft, they think Windows and they think Office, you know? And everything else is nobody cares. That's not true. Satya Nadella, our new CEO, actually had recently had this, you know, very interesting news coverage where he actually had a slide that said Microsoft loves Linux, right? So in the cloud world, it's not about our platform. It's about what customers need. You might have this great idea that runs on Android or on Linux or on Apple or whatever it is. The good news with Microsoft is that it's not about Windows. More than half the workloads that run on Azure today are Linux, believe it or not, right? So we have, we actually run more Linux in our data centers than Windows. And this is what our customers choose to run, right? And we're okay with that.  No, it's about giving you something that actually reduces your time to market and gives you value. So for us, it's, we support open source just like we support our technology. They're all first class citizens on our platform. And these are some customers who are huge and open source on Azure. Now the next question that comes up into your mind and probably you're already thinking of this is now I'm putting all my data and my this new idea that I have is a system. It becomes a system and it's actually sitting in your data center. Or even my customer's data is sitting in your data center. So how can I be sure who's having access to my data? Who is looking at my stuff? You know, is the NSA having a look at it? Are they sitting in our data centers?  So when it comes to compliance, we comply with, we actually comply with a lot of compliance programs. In each of our data centers, it is consistent across the world, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SAS 70, there's a huge list. If you go to that website aka.ms slash azurecompliance, it takes you to the trust center where it details all the things that we comply with and our methodology and the certificates and the reports and stuff. And how can you be sure we're actually complying with this, we do regular audits of our data center by an independent third party auditor, which is Deloitte right now. And they actually make those audit reports available directly to customers from them, not from us. So if we ever fail an audit, our end customers get to know. So for us, it's a very, you know, it's transparency for us all the time. And in addition to that, we allow customers to do penetration testing of our data centers just to ensure security. There is a process for it, but yes, it is something that we allow. Not many cloud service providers want to do that. We also allow data center tours. If you're going to do this huge project on Azure, and let's say you're gonna host it in Dublin and you'd like to visit the Dublin data center, you're more than welcome to do that. And we have one of the very few cloud service providers who actually allow customers access to our data center. Yes, there is a procedure, there's background checks, there's a lot of things that we do, but it is to actually instill a peace of mind for you so that you see the things in place. And some of these policies are so stringent. For example, ISO and SAS, they require that our administrator, there are checks and controls in place so that none of our administrators can actually access data even if they wanted to. So there are things in place that prevent them from doing that. So these things are all documented, and again, they're verified in these audits that happen. So you can rest assured that the integrity of your data, the privacy of your data, the security of your intellectual property is in safe hands at Microsoft. So what are the services we provide in Azure? And now this is where your thinking cap comes on, and then this idea that you have in mind, you start thinking how Azure applies to those things. So again, there's a lot of things we offer in Azure. Some of the common things are being explained over here. So starting from the bottom, there's the storage that we have. And instead of just blob storage where you put data, you also have table storage, storage, if you think of MongoDB, you know SQL, most applications that you develop, and again open source applications, really take advantage of the stuff. It's very fast messaging and data sharing between systems. You can use that. We've got customers in Qatar also right now who are actually using it for high-performance computing. I mean, instead of investing millions to build an HPC environment, you can actually use stuff that's already there in the cloud, cues for messaging between applications. We have that stuff. Again, from a databases perspective or a data perspective, we support SQL, we support MySQL, Oracle as a first-class citizen. It's not about competitors anymore right now. So databases, machine learning is very interesting. In the slide that Ahmed showed in the beginning, I saw some very interesting trends there. I saw machine learning, which is predictive analysis. We call it machine learning.  There's a lot of things that go into it. That prediction, making those decisions easier is what predictive analysis and machine learning do. And also things like the internet of things. I mean, we've got customers using Azure for really interesting stuff. Like when you talk about the London, I'll give you an example of the London Underground. The London Underground, if you think of any railway or metro system, there's rails, there's trains, there's escalators, there's lifts, there's security, there's passengers, there's tickets, there's a lot of things. A lot of moving parts that go into a railway station or a metro station. So what London Underground uses Azure for is actually there are sensors connected to all these things. Temperature of the tracks, the escalators, the lifts, the elevators, all that stuff. So what they do is basically gather that information, big data, unstructured data, bring it together and make meaning out of that data. So for example, so they were actually giving me an example of the escalators, the escalators that people ride up and down. If the gap between the stairs changes beyond a certain threshold, it's a risk because a kid's finger could go inside and it can lead to injuries. So basically they monitor even that and if there is an alert, it actually notifies the nearest service technician about this issue and shuts down that system so that he can come in and he can look at it. So you can go to any extent with this. There are farmers in China who are actually having sensors attached to that cattle to know if the cattle is sick, if the cattle is pregnant and that kind of stuff. So there's fantastic ideas that come out when you think of internet of things. Then there's big data, HD Insight, that's Hadoop on Azure, caching, backup and recovery. Customers use this a lot, backing up your data. Okay, fine, I have my data center here, what do I do? I mean my backups are also in Qatar. I need to put it off site. You have that solution. We have solutions around storage. If you're building an application, which is a mobile application, and most likely, almost everybody in this room is actually thinking of a mobile app to fuel their idea. Azure offers a platform for you to develop applications for Android, iOS, Windows. We offer that platform on the cloud so that you get going quickly. You're probably thinking of a website or a web services platform for enabling this particular idea. Azure provides you that. You're looking for scale, infinite cloud scale. You're starting small and you have this unpredictable or predictable burst. Cloud services is there. You need a couple of servers. You've got VMs. You need to, if your idea is around media and media streaming and indexing and that kind of stuff, you've got media services. If you watch...


In the minds of many Americans, Arlington National Cemetery stands out not only as an honored resting place for our fallen military heroes, but also as an important symbol of the respect our country has for those that have served in our nation's defense. The headstones, markers, and monuments found throughout the cemetery remind us as they pay tribute to the individuals and events that have been part of that service. One of the most inspiring things about Arlington National Cemetery is its unique role in representing and memorializing American history. We have serviced men and women from every major conflict, from the American Revolution to today, interred in these hollow grounds. The history of our nation struggles etched in stone on the marble that adorns each of the 639 acres that make up the cemetery. One memorial stands out as an important symbol of sacrificing commitment and is the very centerpiece of the cemetery, the Arlington National Cemetery Memorial Amphitheater. May 15, 2020, marks the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Memorial Amphitheater. In that 100 years, the amphitheater, like our nation, has experienced change and growth. The Arlington Memorial Amphitheater is a large marble structure composed of an open, semi-elliptical amphitheater surrounded by a colonnaded, covered arcade and attached to a two-story reception hall building. There is a large portico on the west side of the arcade, with smaller porticoes along the north and south sides of the arcade. A large, semi-oval, two-level stage is the focal point of the amphitheater and is attached to the reception hall building at its rear. The amphitheater is placed so that when standing on the stage, the mast of the USS Maine is clearly visible behind the west portico. Arlington Memorial Amphitheater is usually associated with World War I, both because it was completed in 1920 shortly after the war ended and because of the co-located presence of the tomb of the unknown soldier. However, the origins of the amphitheater lay in the American Civil War, which occurred in 1861 and 1865. In the immediate aftermath of the war, communities both north and south began the practice of annually decorating the graves of Civil War veterans. The original Decoration Day was held with a speech behind Arlington House, the former home of Robert E. Lee, and soon it was realized that the growing celebrations for Decoration Day would need a venue to host them. In 1873, the first amphitheater was built at Arlington National Cemetery. Now referred to as Tanner Amphitheater, this was a small, simple amphitheater located near Arlington House. The ceremonies quickly outgrew this venue and in 1908, Congress formed the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater Commission to design and oversee construction of a new, permanent amphitheater. While a simple, pastoral amphitheater had fit American ideas of death and honor in the 19th century, a new century and new world power required something more grand. It was 1913 before Congress authorized construction and 1915 before money was appropriated. In an October of 1915, a ceremony was held with President Wilson using a ceremonial trowel to symbolically set the cornerstone. Following the cornerstone laying ceremony, construction began immediately and initially progressed rapidly with an intended completion date of February of 1917. However, delays of various causes ensued as construction progressed. One of the main issues was with obtaining an adequate supply of marble. With the building almost entirely clad with marble, this imposed inevitable delays on overall construction. Other delays were imposed by changes in the plans for the building. There were significant delays due to weather. More significantly, as the work stretched on the U.S. was drawn inexorably into the First World War, this resulted in severe labor shortages as well as wartime restrictions on transportation that made moving material to the site difficult. By spring 1920, the amphitheater was complete and ready to be dedicated. The date of May 15 was selected for the ceremony. A grand parade proceeded from the National Mall across the 17th Street Bridge and into the cemetery. Following the parade, a ceremony was held in the amphitheater. The speeches delivered by the Secretaries of War and the Navy, the leaders of the Grand Armory of the Republic and the United Spanish War Veterans, and by General Peyton C. March, Chief of Staff, United States Army. While the amphitheater was dedicated in 1920, the world in the United States had changed since construction had began. While the most obvious World War influence was the decision to add a tomb of the unknown soldier to the Eastern Plaza, barely a year following the dedication, there was not enough time to design a proper tomb before the funeral ceremony. The unknown was therefore initially buried under a very simple tomb set into the stairs of the Eastern Plaza. The tomb was completed and unveiled without ceremony in 1932. The tomb of the unknown soldier is guarded continuously by troops from the Third Infantry Regiment, the Old Guard. The memorial amphitheater is popular with both American and international tourists, and is the site of frequent wreath-laying ceremonies as well as larger ceremonies, including especially those held each year on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Once primarily a site of remembrance associated with the specific wars engraved on its arcade, the amphitheater and the adjacent tomb have come to commemorate all U.S. conflicts. While cast in marble and designed to be permanent, Arlington Memorial Amphitheater has changed along with America in the way we honor our war dead. As we consider the impressive architecture of the Memorial Amphitheater and what it represents, we can appreciate the inspiration that led to its creation and how a desire to honor our veterans grew from the humble beginnings of Tanner Amphitheater to the iconic structure of the Arlington National Cemetery Memorial Amphitheater. Tanner Amphitheater was constructed of brick and wood and a little bit of cast iron. By the time the idea of creating a bigger amphitheater came around, the country was establishing itself and thinking of itself as a major world power. The country wanted to build a bigger, grander amphitheater, and that's what we have here, the marble and steel Beaux-Arts structure. This Beaux-Arts style was very popular at the turn of the last century. Its precedents, of course, are the Greek and Roman Republic buildings. Thomas Hastings was the architect for this structure. This was his masterwork and it really has held up well over time. Every decade, the structure gets some major change. The first big change here was the placement of the Tomb of the Unknown in 1921 and following soon after that was the design of the grand staircase that comes up from the lower level of the cemetery up to the Tomb of the Unknown. As we know it today, the big, big change that came in the early 1970s was the plaza elevated along the east front of the reception building and that was brought up so visitors here could better see the changing of the guard and better see the Tomb of the Unknown. Millions of people come here every year and that can wear out of structure. It's hard to keep up with a gentle maintenance practice. We are now in the midst of conserving all the doors on the building. These are very thick doors with wonderful hardware, all original. Even the windows are original with original glass, wood, hardware and these are all being upgraded in order for it to last another hundred years. We started in 2014 to look at what this building needed and one of the things we noted was the number of stains on the buildings and as we got into it we realized that this was a biofilm. We started a series of testing of different products and methods to help us see which product would be the best in preserving the marble and getting that dark stain kind of lightened up and that is zinc oxide. We're now applying it on the building. It is environmentally safe and it has a long life. Science, engineering and historical expertise are required to preserve the Memorial Amphitheater and all of those disciplines were needed as the 100th anniversary created a unique opportunity for the Arlington National Cemetery staff. As part of our celebration of the centennial of the Memorial Amphitheater we recently opened the cornerstone on the east terrace of the Memorial Amphitheater. The time capsule was 105 years old because it was placed in the cornerstone in 1915 but the building actually didn't complete construction until 1920. This is not the original location of the cornerstone. The original cornerstone was covered in the 1970s when this east terrace was added to the building. The cornerstone was removed and taken to the National Archives for safe storage until the 1990s when it was finally placed into the cornerstone. It took us a couple hours but there was no great difficulty in removing the stone. So inside the cornerstone we found two objects. One was the original copper box from 1915. The second object was a Peter Pan peanut butter jar which the ANC team had added when they replaced the cornerstone. So this is over 100 years in the making. This Memorial Valley box is placed in the cornerstone that Woodrow Wilson laid on October 13, 1915. On top of it is an engraved plaque of all of the Memorial Amphitheater Commission members and inside is a small box with plate glass around it and inside of that box is an American flag, a copy of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and other historical memorabilia including coins and stamps of the day. We assembled a team of the ANC conservator historian and facilities maintenance team to open the box. We had created a clean space in the chapel within the Memorial Amphitheater. Once we had opened a corner of it with a series of drill pilot holes we were able to insert a poroscope to see where the contents were inside. At that point we were able to see that there was actually a second copper box within. We were able to cut off the lid of the outer box safely. We were able to lift out the inner copper box. We carefully cut the solder lines on the box. We were able to pry open a corner again and once again stick a poroscope inside. At this point we could see the historical objects. We could see they appeared to be dry in a good condition. We used a series of stainless steel blades and hacksaws to carefully cut the lid off of the inner time capsule. We're excited. It was very exciting to open the time capsule to see things that had not been seen for 105 years. Let me start by saying a few words about memorabilia boxes and time capsules. It is an American concept. The concept is to celebrate the construction of a new institution, a new building, an important new building by providing an opportunity to share what life was like at that particular time in our history. And I must say, the eyes of the archivist, this stuff is in great shape. Those original folks who were responsible for creating the process did a great job. We have the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution as it existed at that point in our history, going through 17 amendments. It's ironic that we're this year celebrating the 19th amendment with women getting the vote, and it doesn't appear in this version of the Constitution. Declaration of Independence, which doesn't get added to, so it's the same declaration that's sitting in my rotunda down the street. One of my favorite things I was so excited to see is this wonderful example of red tape. All of the records in the National Archives when they were moved into that building were carefully protected with wrappings that were held together with this red tape. And this is where the saying comes about cutting through the red tape. It is actually literally the red tape. The inclusion of an American flag is kind of standard in these kinds of memorabilia boxes. And the interesting thing about this flag is the date, of course, was this was done in 1915. And the flag here has 46 stars when there were actually 48 states in 1915. And I would guess having been involved in situations like this that they grabbed what was ever available. And this was the flag that entered the memorabilia box. We are placed in a new capsule in the cornerstone, this one representing the dedicated men and women that serve here at the National Cemetery in the year 2020 to our successors in the year 2120. We are a great people honoring the service and sacrifice to a grateful nation. The Memorial Amphitheater has inspired generations of Americans as a symbol of national pride. And just as those who placed the original time capsule 100 years ago, a new generation will leave reminders of today's America in that same cornerstone to be celebrated 100 years from now.