Joe Biden is edging closer to an election victory as he now has 264 Electoral College votes out of the 270 needed to win. The Democratic candidate only needs to win one more state and he is leading in Nevada and Georgia. Donald Trump has said he will be suing Pennsylvania and Michigan to try and halt vote counts that have been trending toward Biden. This could now get messy and it’s hard to see Donald Trump handing over the keys to the White House easily. Having said that, Australian betting site Sportsbet are already paying out on Biden winning the US Election.

Gold is has had a positive Asian session and leading into the European open the yellow metal is trading nearly half a percent higher above the $1900 level again. Silver (1.71%) is also trading well and looks to be edging closer to trade above the intraday resistance at $24.30 per ounce. Platinum (1.31%), palladium (1.47%) and tin (0.10%) are trading well but the rest of the base metals are all struggling. Both copper and aluminium are down around half a percent. 

In Equities markets, the positive handover from the US helped the Nikkei 225 (1.73%) and ASX (1.28%) trade higher and the Chinese bourses are also in the green as the Shangai Composite moved 1.30% in the black. Over in the FX space, the dollar struggled against the majors and NZD was the outperformer but not in any major way. 

In other news, the Bank of England has left rates unchanged but raised its QE facility to £875 billion (£725 billion prior). The BoE has now moved their monetary policy decisions to the early time of 7 am (London Time). The BoE also said they stand ready to act again if market functioning worsens. Sticking with events in the UK, AstraZeneca has failed to provide the UK with enough doses of its vaccine the target was 40 million doses and reports in the FT suggest the pharmaceutical company only managed to hit 4% of that. Note that Astrazenaca reports their latest earnings figures today.

Looking ahead to the rest of the session the market will be looking out for German industrial orders, Fed and Norges bank rate decisions alongside comments from each central bank. On the earnings front, Alibaba, Commerzbank, SocGen, General Motors and ArcelorMittal give us their latest updates and many more.