09:15am  ~  A nice late start for me this morning after a very late night.  There’s no trading for me today as the U.S. employment numbers are out at lunchtime (UK time) so the markets will be in their usual holding pattern up until then. I shall be off on a cycle ride shortly in the bracing morning air and then in the kitchen with a fire going for the rest of the morning catching up on emails as I did not look at any yesterday.

There were no surprises from either the Bank of England or the European Central Bank yesterday, both leaving their respective policies unchanged, but it’s slowly becoming apparent that the ECB’s next policy move is likely to be in the opposite direction to both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England.

As mentioned above, the main event today is the U.S. non-farm payrolls report and expectations for this afternoon’s employment number are for 197,000, down slightly from November’s 203,000 change, but given some of the strength seen in recent manufacturing data we could see a number well north of 200k. We should not forget that we could also see significant revisions to the previous two months as we’ve witnessed in previous years.

The S&P500 moved up slightly on a volatile day’s trading and now seems to be in a definite up-trend going towards the high of 1852 seen last week.  Gold is trading in a bit of a channel and needs some large movements in equities to force it into some worthwhile (tradeable) movement, maybe we’ll see that later at 1:30pm ?