Great summary from the team @visualcapitalist on current and pending Cryptocurrency regulation.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-cryptocurrency-regulations-around-the-world/

Whether you are an advocate or not it’s pretty clear that most jurisdictions see regulation of the Cryptocurrency space as something pressing and with the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Directive becoming fast effective in Jan 2020 this is very real for market participants.

Interesting to see how this develops and whether the exchanges start to adopt best practices, provide transparency on pricing and cease to act as principal to transactions. Hard to see how they can address the raft of conflict of issue concerns (and litigation) unless they do.

It’s been a while since our last Brexit update. Based on our latest network analysis, Boris Johnson and Ursula Von der Leyen have emerged onto the centre stage.

The newly elected members of the European Parliament finally choose Von der Leyen as the successor of Juncker. And Boris Johnson yesterday replacing Theresa May as the new Prime Minister of UK. Although both Johnson and Von der Leyen are still very new to their jobs, they have already managed to shift the social networks among UK and EU politicians significantly.

The upper chart shows the landscape of key politicians in February 2019, while the bottom chart shows the landscape now in July 2019.

The right-hand side of the chart represents the UK (purple and blue) and the left-hand side represents the EU (orange and brown).

On UK (right-hand side), Boris Johnson has moved to the very centre area. We think his willingness to confront EU made him deeply “connected” with the EU side, for both good and bad reasons. Jeremy Corbyn is still quite distant from the centre stage. We are also surprised to see that the “Bremain” supporting MPs have either been side-lined or disappeared from the network, and the market has reflected this observation by pricing in more likelihood of hard Brexit.

On the EU side, Von der Leyen emerged to centre out of nowhere. The highly regarded successor of Draghi, Christine Lagarde, has also emerged into the game but so far only captures very little connections.

We think the transformation of the landscape of Brexit network in such a short period of time is very fascinating, and we will stop here and not rushing to make any interpretation. Let’s see how this network will evolve as we move forward to October and the deadline to leave, deal or not.

It’s a populist environment these days as politicians race to propose or even roll out ideas that were viewed as controversial or naive in the past. Tariffs are new norms, and anti-immigration policies have become hot topics among people and politicians. The world of finance has also caught on with this populist trend, as increasing numbers of economists, senators, sell-side analysts and even well-known fund managers recently have shared their thoughts on the latest hot topic in finance: Modern Monetary Theory(MMT).

Seismic report: https://medium.com/@blog.seismic/mmt-brewing-2e42174edcb0

As the chaos in Westminster reaches a crescendo the team at Seismic have conducted more research on who really matters now going into the Brexit process. Some interesting observations, we hope you find this useful in shaping your views and perspective.

Seismic report: https://medium.com/@blog.seismic/brexit-who-matters-now-fd3dcb863906

Wishing you and your family health, wealth and happiness in the year of the Boar from all the team at Howard Trading.

An excellent report from the team at Seismic Investments. This time focusing on Oil and the social listening narrative from unstructured data that is in the news and across social media.

The past couple months have seen Crude oil trade from its high of 85.90 on 3rd October down 29% to a low of 53 on the 27th December then back up 13% to current 61.20 levels. Pricing volatility has returned with a vengeance.

The report aims to provide some incremental context on the pricing movement and a contextual analysis of the key participants and how they correlate to the price activity.

We hope you find this an incremental in the shaping of your perspectives on Oil pricing.

If you want to connect with the team at Seismic please reach out.

Seismic report: https://medium.com/seismic-blog/oil-narrative-evolution-b748c2f0b66f

With the largest UK parliamentary voting defeat for a standing government in eighty years followed by a vote of confidence in the government that passed in the house of parliament it may be reasonable to say perspectives around Brexit are confused, somewhat contradictory and very challenging.

Is this the train wreck hidden in plain sight or will Theresa May’s efforts to bring cross-party participation into the process fall on deaf ears? Or are we entering a new variant of the Nash Equilibrium as game theory plays out with party politics?

We reached out to the team at Seismic Investment Limited to solicit their input using social listening tools combined with artificial intelligence and graphical clustering models. The results of their research and analysis provide both interesting insights and a perspective on the key players in the process.

If you have questions please reach out and we can connect you to the team at Seismic.

Seismic Post: https://link.medium.com/nIvzmPlExT