SGM-FX insights

What a Load of Carp   Christmas is Cancelled! Well, not quite yet, but the reality for Members of Parliament is that a few days of their Christmas break could be revoked next week should the United Kingdom and European Union come to an agreement on a trade deal soon. These rumours began to gather […]

UK Hiring   While still 10% below last year, evidence is mounting that hiring is back in some sectors of the UK economy, and is at its highest since March: media and communications +41%, finance +24%, law +42% . At the other end of the scale, retail, recreation and travel are flat to small minus. […]

Tough day at the Commons   Everywhere from government to markets, households to workplaces, people are looking two ways with respect to the pandemic. Firstly, at what is ahead and the promise of a vaccine and secondly, what lies between then and now. However, not one of these collectives have better demonstrated this ‘mind the […]

T’was 33 nights before Christmas..   When all through the foreign exchange market not a cross was stirring, not even the Pound. Sterling longs were hung by the CME with care, in the hopes that Mr (Lord) Frost would be there soon.   That’s enough poetic parody from me for this year, but Clement Clarke […]

Bye!   The removal of special advisor Dominic Cummings and the bubbling cauldron of tensions in Number 10 could show us a lot about Brexit. Number 10 does have a back door that photographers and journalists are banned from. Probably more than one in reality. So when Cummings was forced to walk out the big […]

Word of the year   Lockdown! Collins, a household name for producing the rival to the Oxford English Dictionary, has chosen ‘lockdown’ as its word of the year for 2020. In fact, our worlds have been impacted so greatly by the new Coronavirus that 6 out of the shortlisted 10 words included reference to the […]

Firebreak   Ireland and Wales have both announced firebreak lockdowns designed to stop the spread of Covid-19 in its tracks. The logic is simple: with the lifecycle of the virus in humans estimated to be a little over 10 days, if every member of the population follows the lockdown perfectly the virus should be eliminated […]

GBP   We have warned in the past weeks that as the outcome on the Brexit talks nears its conclusion (?!) that GBP would behave more like a shuttlecock than a frisbee ie it will be volatile rather than skimming or gliding across the price graphs. Yesterday all it took was for a Financial Times […]

Recession Asian Style   The Asian Development Bank has announced that for the first time in 60 years the 45 nation region will enter a recession and its economies will contract by 0.7% this year. The West can only look on with envy especially given that the ADB has also announced that Asia will rebound […]

8th time lucky…     As the eighth formal round of talks between the European Union and the United Kingdom get underway in London today Sterling traders are facing the reality of a no-deal conclusion to the transition period in only a few months’ time. Despite the relentless Brexplainers published, this critical moment for the […]

Brexit   Throughout the course of Brexit negotiations there has been a severe and frequent mispricing of risk in the UK Pound. The nature of negotiation and politics brings the obstacle of a series of high-risk events not least overnight summits, negotiation phases and general elections as we have seen on several occasions since 23 […]

Pitter Patter   On the more eclectic scale of renewable energy concepts was to harness the power of walking. By not having a completely fixed pathway, a pavement could rest upon dampers that could harness the kinetic energy of the pathway generated by people walking up and down the street. If you don’t think the […]