Key Points:

DJA and S&P500 soar to new all time highs

Moderna announces 94.5% efficacy in vaccine trials

Several US states announce further lockdown restrictions

As expected further good news was unleashed on the world yesterday as Moderna announced 94.5% efficacy on their vaccine trials, beating Pfizer’s 90% last week. That leaves room for another contender to try and beat the other two. The big plus with Moderna’s vaccine is that it doesn’t have the same storage and transportation headache that Pfizer has due to not needing to be stored at such a low temperature. Great news of course but the realisation as reiterated by Joe Biden is that we are a long way off being able to distribute these vaccines. A lot of people will die in the meantime unless better precautions are taken. New York, Illinois, Philadelphia and California have announced further restrictions to gatherings in a bid to get on top of recent escalation but many other states are still turning a blind eye. The UK has posted a 25% increase in deaths in the last 24 hours but France has seen a reduction in new cases proving that lockdown does work! Markets however aren’t too concerned with virus cases with both S&P500 and Dow Jones closing at record highs and WTI added another 3% ignoring the impact that further lockdowns may have in the US. Gold had a look at 1900 but was rejected to close unchanged on the day, overall the USD was weaker across the board with DXY falling back to 92.50. As expected the commodity currencies have fared well with AUD unaffected by RBA Lowe’s speech pushing back towards 0.7330. USD/CAD is now back below 1.31, benefiting from the move higher in Oil and NZD is looking to retest last week’s high above 0.6900. EUR/USD had a 50 pip range but closed where it opened around 1.1845 as Cable fell back from 1.3245 to 1.3195 with further negative Brexit headlines impacting. USD/JPY spiked to 105.10 on the Moderna news and in similar vein to EUR closed unchanged on the day around 104.60. Asia’s session ahead will be dominated by the release of RBA minutes sandwiched between Kent and DeBelle’s speeches but unlikely to discover anything here that we are unaware of. It’s possible there may be a reference to the AUD strength in the minutes so watch for a quick pullback, however if risk remains buoyant then AUD will move higher towards a retest of 0.7340 from last week. Tonight we get a look at US retail sales and yet again BoE Governor Bailey will be speaking, not expecting any surprises from him.