It’s crunch time! Another week, another Brexit deadline looming.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but this seems to be the final week to get an agreement done between the UK and the EU. Although it seems any time there’s a deadline it only gets missed anyway, so who knows if this one will actually force some progress to be made.

Either way, I’m sure we can expect the markets to respond to whatever happens this week. So let’s discuss the situation and take a look at what opportunities may be out there for GBP/USD.

Crunch Time for Brexit

Let’s start with why this week is a critical one, or as the Irish foreign minister called it, “crunch time”. …

Although all eyes are on the US election today, it’s been a pretty eventful day for Australia as well.

There have been policy decisions from the Reserve Bank and some news on the trade tensions with China. Let’s take a look at what’s happened and what this means for the Aussie dollar.

The RBA Announcement

Let’s start off with a run-through of what the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) announced before we take a look at the markets.

The main news from the RBA is that they’re cutting rates from 0.25% to 0.10% …

Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, is said to have stated that in the short run the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.

It means, in the short term the price of a company may be dictated by its popularity in the market but over the long term the price will be more in line with the actual value of the company.

The difference between the voting machine and the weighing machine also dictates how investors should be planning their own investing strategy. …

On the 5th of June, President Donald Trump gave a speech about the US jobs numbers and he said:

When economic crises unfold, the world goes through a period of doom and gloom. Jobs are lost, businesses fail and policy measures kick in to combat the downturn. In the markets, many investors lose big and often take years, if not decades to recover. While others not only survive, but thrive in these harsh market conditions.

Of all market participants, the ones best placed to navigate these rough waters should be hedge funds, but that’s not always the case. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest winners and losers in crises from the world of hedge funds.

The World’s First hedge Fund

If there’s one thing we’ve learned recently, it’s that some things which start off small and local can become a global problem very quickly. With that in mind, it shouldn’t surprise you when I say that a small town in Oklahoma with a population of fewer than 8,000 was the epicentre of a seismic financial event that took place in April and is looming yet again this month.

Cushing might be a small town, but it plays a critical role in North America’s benchmark oil, West Texas Intermediate. Yes, that’s the one you may have heard about experiencing negative prices last month. …

Back in January, Wilbur Ross, the US Commerce Secretary, believed that COVID-19 would accelerate the return of jobs to the US. Unfortunately, as the economy comes to a standstill, businesses close their doors and people are asked to stay at home, it seems the very opposite is taking place.

With the US economy being so important around the world, its status is often seen as a sign of how the global economy is faring. In particular, employment figures out of the US are often seen as some of the most important releases on the global economic calendar.

As the coronavirus crisis has taken more of a hold in the US, the expected impact on the economy has continued to grow. Some Federal Reserve economists are now expecting the unemployment rate to top 30%, which would mean around 47 million people out of work. …

The morning of October 19th 1987 might have seemed just like any other Monday in the markets. It was a chilly day in New York, but little did the traders in the Stock Exchange know that things were about to heat up dramatically.

Unexpectedly, the global financial markets crashed throughout the day and the Dow Jones suffered a 22.6% loss, the worst single-day drop it has ever seen, on a day that would forever go down in the history books as ‘Black Monday’.