By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- A pipeline that ships 2.5 million barrels of fuel a day to east coast cities is still down after a ransomware attack on Friday. DogeCoin is left deflated by Elon Musk’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. Copper and iron ore hit new records as the yuan hits a three-year high. The pound surges as a fresh vote on Scottish independence becomes less likely. Here's what you need to know in financial markets on Monday, 10th May.
1. Colonial Pipeline still down
Crude oil and U.S. gasoline futures reacted with relative calm to the disruption of supplies from the biggest pipeline to the country’s biggest demand centers on the East Coast.
By 6:30 AM ET, U.S. crude futures were up 0.5% at $65.19 a barrel, ,more than a dollar below last week’s high, while Gasoline RBOB Futures were also off their March highs despite rising 1.1% to $2.1507 a gallon.
Colonial Pipeline Company, whose infrastructure ships 100 million gallons of fuel east from the Gulf coast every day, said its main lines were still out of commission on Sunday evening despite efforts to bring them back up. The U.S. government, meanwhile has enacted emergency powers to lift restrictions on other means of getting vital fuel supplies to market.
“As things stand, this should be a short-term disruption, but it will add some noise to data,” said Paul Donovan, chief economist with UBS Global Wealth Management, in a morning podcast.
2. Musk deflates DogeCoin
DogeCoin lost nearly one-third of its value after its booster-in-chief Elon Musk failed to generate any new momentum for the intrinsically worthless piece of computer code during his appearance hosting Saturday Night Live.
The script of the comedy sketch in which Musk was questioned by other members of the SNL crew about the crypto asset had Musk admitting “it’s a hustle”, but of more significance was the lack of any halfway earnest attempt to promote DogeCoin to an audience magnified by NBC’s decision to stream it live in many countries outside the U.S.
By 6:30 AM ET, DogeCoin was trading at just over 52c, down from a high of 73.8c before the show. Outflows from DogeCoin appeared to find a home in both Bitcoin and Ethereum, the latter rising nearly 6% to as high as $4,163.73 before retracing a little.
3 Stocks set to open mixed amid JEDI news
U.S. stocks are set to open mixed later, as the market struggles to interpret a surprisingly weak employment report from Friday.
Early reactions had tended to the bad-news-as-good-news approach, giving more emphasis to the continuation of ultra-loose macro policy than to concerns about the mismatching of supply and demand in the labor market in a post-pandemic world.
By 6:30 AM ET (1030 GMT), Dow Jones futures were up 80 points, or 0.2%, while S&P 500 futures were up less than 0.1% and Nasdaq 100 futures were down 0.3%.
Stocks likely to be in focus later include Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), amid reports that the U.S. Department of Defense is rethinking its $10 billion ‘JEDI’ contract for Cloud hosting, the implementation of which is being delayed by litigation from Amazon.
Earnings season is winding down, but there will still be updates later from Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK), Air Products (NYSE:APD) and Marriott, among others.
4. Copper, iron ore hit new records as yuan surges
Iron ore Futures and copper futures hit new record highs overnight in Asia, as the U.S. employment report hit the dollar without fundamentally damaging the case for a continued boom in Chinese demand for industrial metals. The yuan hit its highest level since Donald Trump ramped up his trade war with China back in 2018.
Futures for iron ore in Singapore hit $207.25 a ton before closing just below that level, still a gain of over 7% on the day.
Copper futures, meanwhile, rose as high as $10,746 a ton in London before retracing to $10,705.25. Demand for both metals helped the stocks of Glencore (OTC:GLNCY), Anglo American (LON:AAL) and Rio Tinto (NYSE:RIO), some of the world’s biggest miners, to their highest level since the pandemic started, also lifting the FTSE 100 to its highest in 15 months.
5. Reopening, Scottish poll results lift Sterling
U.K. assets were well supported across the board as the government unveiled its latest economic reopening measures in response the sharp drop in Covid-19 cases across the country.
Sterling rose to its highest against the dollar since February, also helped by news that the Scottish National Party had lost its absolute majority in the devolved Scottish parliament. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon can still count on support for a new referendum on independence from the Green Party and – for now – from opinion polls, but analysts said the risk of a U.K. breakup in the near term had receded.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is to hold a press conference later that will confirm the reopening of the indoor hospitality industry and the resumption of non-essential foreign travel. EasyJet (LON:EZJ) and Wizz Air (LON:WIZZ) stock fell however on disappointment that the government’s “green list” of travel destinations wasn’t longer.