Happy New Year, everyone! Hope that all of you had a great celebration or time off and that you’re refreshed for another new trading year ahead.

Markets are still largely affected by thin conditions with liquidity still rather lacking and I would expect things to stay that way until tomorrow or next week at least.

In the major currencies space, things are a little mixed with the pound finding itself on the back foot while the aussie and franc are also mildly weaker on the day so far.

Looking ahead, we’ll have manufacturing PMI releases in the European morning but these will be final readings for December, so they won’t really matter all too much.

The focus will be on the final releases for France, Germany and the overall Eurozone. As such, given that these are final readings, they shouldn’t have much – or any – impact on markets unless the figures deviate substantially from initial reports.

The preliminary report can be found here. The initial reading pretty much reaffirmed a lackluster end to 2019 for the UK economy and the final reading here should just confirm that domestic conditions may point towards an economic contraction in Q4.

Prior release can be found here. The data provides information on the number of announced corporate layoffs by industry and region and acts as a general labour market indicator.

That’s all for the session ahead. I wish you all the best of days to come and good luck with your trading!