00:00European futures pointing higher. U.S. futures, though, don't look quite so pretty, pointing a little bit lower.
00:05Is the benefit, the risk on from the shutdown, is that limited? Is that shutdown disappearing, I should say?
00:12Is that limited and done?
00:15I think, Anna, that the price action is quite worrying despite the gains.
00:20And what I mean by that is that we seem to be very jittery and moving very rapidly on relatively low volumes.
00:26The shutdown resolution, which we expect this week, will obviously be good news.
00:31The two reasons I'm a little bit kind of qualified, that positivity, is that we rallied much further than expected yesterday.
00:39We kind of gave back a lot of those gains very quickly on almost no news today, which just shows these markets are jittery.
00:44And then when you go into that shutdown resolution, I think there's an assumption that the House passes it first time around.
00:49That's not necessarily so clear. There might be a little bit of a, you know, buy the rumour, sell the fact episode around it.
00:55So, I find the price action not very encouraging.
00:59The structural story is the AI theme is still strong.
01:02I still expect fresh records for stocks in the coming months.
01:06But I'm not convinced that the pullback that started two weeks ago is fully exhausted yet.
01:11And I'm curious about that for the next couple of weeks.
01:15Mark, you seem to be spending an alarming amount of time looking at crypto at the moment.
01:18This is a whole new Mark Cudmore.
01:19And I'm fascinated to kind of get your take on what you see happening there.
01:26Yeah, like, and probably too much time.
01:29It's a great kind of call out because half my team think that, you know, I'm probably looking for a signal where there might not be one.
01:37Having spent too much time analysing it, I think that the conclusion is the direct pass-through from crypto to the rest of the macro world is pretty minimal.
01:46But the indirect pass-through is definitely relevant.
01:49I think that the impact on the retail sector, on the wealth fact, is quite large.
01:55And I think that if you're going to have a deepening correction in the crypto sector and, you know, digital asset treasury companies and all the related kind of crypto sector, digital asset sector overall,
02:08then I think that will hurt some of the key retail names in tech as well and therefore impact the broader stock market, even though the direct wealth transition is not the same.
02:18The main investor base does not overlap too much, but it still matters.
02:22And the reason I then look at crypto, even though it's less relevant, is that it seems to be the leading indicator.
02:26It seems to be the most high beta.
02:28So it might give a slight lead when sentiment is turning.
02:32Mark, I want to circle back and end the conversation with the shutdown question.
02:36If we do start to get more data prints come out, how many data prints do we need for a clean read?
02:44I think the data is going to be clouded for months.
02:49And it's one of these classic cases that every data print is going to be interpreted through the bias of the beholder, of the reader of the data.
02:57I think, you know, it's going to be that opportunity to spin it either way.
03:00The fact is, is the private sector data we've seen in the economy shows that the economy is doing OK.
03:06Sure, it's a case-shaped economy, but it's not collapsing in recession anytime soon.
03:09Yeah.
03:10The case is, it's not a case-shaped economy, but it's not a case-by-step economy.
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