Results of Market predictions (currencies and commodities) Saturday 3rd October 2026

Results for week just gone:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10qIEqo9DICxuHtDqohC7k6MMlpng-LpQLwtlWArdxkw/edit?usp=sharing

Prediction for coming week:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O5xs_v3e5B9TYgOUxmk4beD84PnAvHA1p9ULROupr2E/edit?usp=sharing 

 

I didn't factor in the strong US dollar for the week just gone. US 10 Year Treasury bond yields rose to 5.273% causing an inflow of money into the US and a strengthened US dollar - the most remarkable change was the Dollar basket DXY rising to $1.0160.

I am interested in US employment numbers. The Non-Farm Payroll figures for September showed a decline in the number of job starts. There were also some retrospective downward re-ratings of August and July figures by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Elsewhere, figures from bodies like ADP show expanding employment. How can this be? Yes, the US economy seems to be fully charged but surely the influence of AI should now be affecting employment numbers?

  

Market predictions (currencies and commodities) Saturday 3rd October 2026
Category	Price ending 26 Sep 2026	Predicted price on 3 Oct 2026	View	Reason / comments	Right? Y/N	Actual price ending on 3 Oct 2026	Comments / Post mortem
EUR/USD	1.1391	1.1324	Bearish	Higher Ger inflation. Higher US NFP	Yes	1.1250	A lot lower. First Euro below 1.13 since 03/25
GBP/USD	1.3245	1.325	Bullish	A hard week. Oversold GBP. Unaffected NFP	No	1.3240	High bonds, strong $. NFP brought it down
USD/CHF	0.8285	0.8339	Bullish	Swiss Fed no rate change. Welcoming carry	Yes	0.8286	Expected more. Going to plan till NFP sell off
USD/JPY	157.23	156.81	Bearish	Poss BoJ intervention. Strong Tankan data	No	157.87	Slight gain.Disunited BoJ. Strong $ still
AUD/USD	0.7025	0.6985	Bearish	higher Aus infl. lukewarm Chi PMI	Yes	0.6958	Steeper decline. The USD abounds
NZD/USD	0.5664	0.5625	Bearish	reaching bottom of trading range. No news	Yes	0.5616	In general, still gentle decline
US Dollar DXY	1.0073	1.0024	Bearish	Overbought - slight decline	No	1.0160	Completely wrong. Strong US Treasuries
Spot Gold	4,285	4,216	Bearish	Downward trend cont. Unaffected by USD	Yes	4,143	Lower than expected. USD inflows.
Copper	14,630	14,896	Bullish	AI boom continues. Hypers will pay any price	No	14,251	Strong $ bad. Chinese hols no demand
Soybeans	1,329	1,339	Bullish	Poor US crop harvest. Supply. No top 1340	No	1,291	Decline - better Chicago harvest
Corn	533	541	Bullish	2.49 ratio to soybean. Supply probs. Slight hgh	No	502	Decline - good harvest? News due
WTI Oil	92.32	90.34	Bearish	Depends on Straits peace deal. Seems quiet.	Yes	90.50	Prices fell. Quiet week. Dojis.
Brent Oil	98.73	96.41	Bearish	Depends on Straits peace deal. Seems quiet.	No	102.34	Going to plan till last minute upward rally
US Tec/Nasdaq	30,638	30,718	Bullish	Stellar AI from semicons this week	Yes	30,723	Micron 2 year full order book. More AI
Wall St/Dow	51,830	51,519	Bearish	Downward trend continues	Yes	51,133	K-shaped economy. Old world declines
FTSE 100	10,743	10,651	Bearish	Downward trend continues	Yes	10,494	Bond worries
Germany DAX	25,551	25,162	Bearish	High inflation, poor growth. Decline.	Yes	25,310	Bond worries. Eurozone bond worries
				TOTAL
				YESes	10
				Noes	7

Force 6 storm curtails sailing race ... and other Shields delights

 View from ... Shields Weekly News of 1985

 

Here's a page from the Shields Weekly News, the local newspaper for North Shields, dated Thursday, August 29th, 1985.

I found it in amongst some clippings kept by my old dad, Howard Thompson who was involved with the rescue boat team at Tynemouth Sailing Club. The reason he kept this item is because the club was hosting the national Enterprise dinghy yacht competition. It must have been over the August Bank Holiday weekend.

 

But disaster struck in the way of Force 6 gale, unusual for that time of the year.

The news item tells us that over twenty dinghies capsized.

Ordinarily, the sailing club holds races in the more placid waters of the estuary of the Tyne, inside the safety of the North and South Piers.

Because of the prestigious nature of this race, it was staged in the more dangerous waters of the open North Sea where safety would have been a bigger concern.

And now a storm kicked in.

Having a rough idea of forecast, one can only imagine if the race organisers had agonised over whether the event should take place.

Having had direct experience in helping my Dad with rescue operations in the inaugural 1974, primarily by sitting in Tynemouth Coastguard station with a powerful set of military-grade binoculars (captured from the Germans) and watching out to sea if any boats capsized, I know that twenty going over would have been highly alarming and a real danger to life.

Someone, then, made the decision to call out the RAF in Boulmer and deploy Sea King helicopters to rescue those sailors stuck overboard.

It must have been quite a dramatic and arduous day for the organisers, quite a relief to know that, too my knowledge at least, there weren’t any life-threatening casualties and that all the capsized boats recovered, presumably towed back into the Estuary and safely to Sailing Club’s base at the Prior’s Haven.

As a kid, I used to pore over the Shields Weekly News. I don’t know what attracts me to reading local newspapers – I would like to think it’s because I recognise a street or a place or the name of someone. Anyway, all human life – for good or for bad used to be in these pages.

The newspaper items are of the time – 1985 was a very poor era on Tyneside. It was at the height of Thatcher’s Britain where traditional industry and mining were in their final throes and the dole queues were long.

There wasn’t much money about in North Shields so it’s no surprise the news page is filled with petty crime – there were lot of break-ins and minor robberies.

So, in 1985 it was perfectly normal for somewhere like the Rex Bingo Hall next to North Shields railway station to have had its fruit machines robbed,

Somebody nicking nine cartons of frozen cod from the back of a lorry on the Fish Quay didn’t turn heads.

Couple of fourteen year old boys playing with matches in the backyard. So what? When a lit match hot exploded on impact with the petrol can, well the kid “was being stupid” – reported to the police and probably met with a clip round the ear.

What a page this was! 

To top it off a “nightclub incident”! Yes, a bit of fisty-cuffs outside Mingles on the Whitley Bay seafront. Mingles was a notorious dive, popular with all the cool kids at the Sixth Form College. In its heyday when it was a rock club dive featuring frequent appearances from famous local band the Tygers of Pan Tang who went on to get a bit of national success.

As a gawky stay-at-home teenager, I was very jealous of missing out, although perhaps not if I’d been punched in the face by a drunk outside the front door. 

Such fun!

Tynemouth  

Corporate performance management tools: the exciting software with the dull name

View From the Corporate World

In recent years, the business world has seen the rise of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) products. It may sound dull but CPM software is becoming one of the most tools used by a finance department to plan and forecast an organization’s financial health and profitability.

CPM software is used by finance departments to track and measure a company’s Financial, Planning & Analysis (FP&A) policy.

It’s a relatively new layer of software available for the finance function of an organization and can work alongside existing technology such HR, General Ledger, CRM, ERP, etc.

 

Dull name, exciting software

 

Being tagged with such a boring and hard-to-remember name makes it hard to get a feel for the corporate performance management market size or user numbers.

A quick search reveals very little. The market survey summaries on the net seem to be generated by AI bots using that smug list-style using generic, context-free language.

In recent years, many published reports about all sorts of markets and business sectors have become increasingly unreliable. They have become the scourge of reputable business publishers who use sound journalistic methods and well-researched data to analyse a technology or business sector and forecast where it is heading. 

 

The woes of "McResearch" in trying to guage a market size

By contrast, there has been an explosion of market research (“McResearch”) firms in recent years that seem to wade into any sector and take a haphazard snapshot of it. Quite often they use unsupervised employees, often young graduates that gather the information and risk the danger of using unverified and unchecked data.

Anyway, the market size for CPM software is anywhere between $7 and $8 billion, depending on the source with projections to the $20 billion mark by 2030, which is not insignificant.

According to the report entitled “Global Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Software Industry Research Report 2023” the following companies are suppliers: Prophix Software, Planful, Tagetik Software, OneStream Software, Unit4 Prevero, Jedox, Oracle, Anaplan, Solver, Vena Solutions, Insightsoftware, Infor, SAP, Kepion Solution, Workday Adaptive Planning, Magiq Software, Board International, Pentana Performance  and IBM.

It’s a busy space with many products offering overlapping functions not necessarily concentrating on CPM tasks. 

 

Enter the Financial, Planning & Analysis prof.

As mentioned above, the emergence of CPM tools has corresponded with the rise of FP&A as a defined function. This has particularly been seen in the number of courses and teaching modules at university and higher education in wider accountancy, finance and business courses and degrees.

In turn, the number of companies hiring specific FP&A analysts has risen and the number of finance professionals with FP&A in their (LinkedIn) description has grown in the last few years too. 

 

But what does an FP&A analyst do?

Using an organization’s financial data they plan, forecast, budget and support the company’s major business decisions looking ahead to plotting future prosperity and financial health. These processes include forecasting, scenario modeling and performance reporting. FP&A takes accounting to a higher level and creates a way of predicting future revenues, expenses, profits, and cash flows.

If knowledge is power, then potentially that’s quite a lot of corporate power concentrated into the hands of a small group within a finance division.

Back to CPM software and the FP&A function where crafting budgets is one of the most important tasks. A good CPM software tool will include visualization features that can turn a budget’s raw financial figures into interesting and presentable graphs and charts. Many have built-in forecasting capabilities enabling finance teams to estimate how much revenue and profit their organizations will generate in upcoming quarters based on historical data.

This capability for forecasting is part of the broader features provided for financial planning and can be crucial for giving a company an edge in financial profitability or efficiency.

Also, scenario modeling tools makes it possible to estimate the impact of potential business changes on the bottom line. Finance teams can share the assessments with executives to inform strategy decisions.

Importantly, CPM software can eliminate whole swathes of manual work related to routine recurring activities in FP&A such as manual spreadsheet reporting and checking. As a result, FP&A teams can focus more on providing strategic insights and collaborating with business units. 

 

CPM in action

Take the example of a client of UK-based finance and management consultancy firm, Red Egg Consulting. One of its clients, a large, nationwide professional services agent, was distributing over 47 Excel spreadsheet budget templates which needed to be returned and consolidated centrally. “The budget managers were making ad hoc changes to those templates”, explains Roger Lovis, founder of the consultancy, “it meant it created time-wasting inefficiency in central and corporate assumptions after each template revision”.

The consultancy recommended a CPM software program to track and optimize the same budget template structure. “Because these templates were nested within the client’s system it allowed for automatic consolidation changes, such as additional rows without disrupting the client’s underlying IT framework”, continues Lovis.

The CPM software workflow allowed the template completion to be managed efficiently. The client’s budget managers could now make single entry changes to central assumptions.

CPM software’s online analytical processing (OLAP) data capability allows financial analysts to interface and pull in data (financial and non-financial) even at a transaction level. This then gives the users and analysts the capability to slice and dice data to provide meaningful management information, even with drill down resources for supporting business information.

The software also includes vizualisation features tied to business intelligence tools such as Microsoft PowerBI that can turn raw financial figures into graphs, and can automatically update reports like monthly senior management packs.

Many CPM software programs have built-in forecasting capabilities enabling finance teams to estimate how much revenue and profit their organizations will generate in upcoming quarters based on historical data.

It’s not hard to see, then, why more and more companies in the corporate world are beginning to rely on the Financial, Planning and Analysis function to improve their financial health and by using Corporate Performance Management tools to do so. 

 

More at my Linkedin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-thompson-4388764/

 

Can the smartphone outsmart the payphone?

I had completely forgotten the Cardphone, the posh version of a coin-operated payphone.

View from ... the Phonebox

In the bigger scheme of things, what will come of the smartphone? 

We're practically glued!

Will there be a time for fond memories of swiping up, scrolling down? Or misty-eyed reminiscence of not-spots, hot-spots and deadzones?

Or musing how teenagers were able to walk, eyes down on screen, yet still avoid a head-on collision?

Perhaps the age of the smartphone will never end but the likelihood is its time will pass just as it’s passed with all other types of communications technology.

I was reminded of all this whilst reading a passage in the excellent novel Possession by A.S. Byatt, published in 1990. 

Holding your nerve when there's a queue outside

It refers to a cardphone – a public telephone box where you slotted a pre-paid phonecard into the machine before you dialled. 

I was a regular user of these yet had completely forgotten about them. In their time were the cutting edge in consumer technology. 

Now belongs in a museum

Strangely, the era of the phonecard also coincided with the worst of times for phone boxes many of which became smelly, vandalised and squalid places to be.

“…. he found a cardphone box that had to be functioning because it had a long queue.” it says.

Yes – so frustrating to tramp the streets of north London trying to find a phone box that worked.

Someone, Byatt says  “… played some complicated trick on the phone box with her car keys and talked interminably”.

Yes, this!

And eventually pacing around the phone box “like hyenas, threatening eye-contact”

Yes, this too! 

once a common sight

But I remember these as tactics played on YOU as a caller. Phone box politics meant that you had to somehow resist being intimidated by the “hyenas” outside and hold out on conducting the “my news” and “your news” pleasantries inside the hallowed cubicle.

But then one day, without noticing, they disappeared. Gone was the phonecard box (which I think by this time had merged with its coin-based poor relation into one machine), passed into oblivion, replaced by the smartphone.

These days if you find a phonebox it’s more likely to be a defibrillator station or a second-hand book stall with an honesty box.

So will the same fate happen to the smartphone? Only time will tell…

 

Decorating and Xeroxing

The price of decorating and photocopying in 1973 and how it compares to today

View from … a bygone age

John Lewis always had a big branch in Newcastle, but until 2002 it was called Bainbridge’s and in 1973 it was located in Market Street.

Your bill, sir!

 

Judging by this receipt, Bainbridge’s seemed like quite the place to get all your decorating supplies.

In 1973 you paid 41p for a paint brush (you can find one at John Lewis for £7 today).

Sandpaper would set you back 7 new pence (John Lewis doesn’t sell it today but you can buy some for £2).

I can’t read the other items but that seems like quite a haul of 8 goods, all for £1.72. Sorry, no computerised inventory checks yet.

All for 22 new pence

 

Meanwhile, here is a bill from the office at Tyne Tees TV for 15 photocopies. For “the Wall”, it says here. Price: 22p, 31^st May 1973. Nice to see payment in full by cheque.

Photocopying hadn’t reached its peak yet – think about all those Student Film Soc. Hand-outs, agit-prop leaflets, demos, marches, sit-ins, samizdat material from behind the Iron Curtain.

Xerox-ing technology was still in its infancy and quite expensive.

Teacher-led handouts, first-day-at-work rules and regs, sale-now-on leaflets and a myriad of promotional bumpf for shows, concerts, newsletters and bill posters were all yet to come.

Photocopying was to go through the classic technology arc that occurs in things like desktop computers, toasters and transistor radios.

Production at scale leads to a greater competition (Canon, Ricoh!) leads to lower pricing.

And eventually common-place banality or technology redundancy as cameras in our smartphones made photocopying irrelevant.

In 1973, it’s interesting to see how the office at Tyne Tees TV was charging employees for the service. That must have been to stop illicit freebie copying.

It’s also interesting to note that in 2024 you can get 15 photocopies done at a copy shop for £4.50. That’s quite a modest price rise, in comparison to, say, a paint brush.

But then, you’d have to find somewhere with a photocopier, and that’s quite hard in this day and age...

 

Yevonde - "Be original or die"

View From ... The Gallery

A new exhibition of the influential portrait photographer's work...

 Yevonde Middleton burst onto the photography scene in 1914 when she opened her first studio in Victoria Street, London at the age of just 21.

Yevonde - self-portrait

Originating from a well-to-do family in London, throughout her career she was simply known as Yevonde. 

From the 1920s until her death in 1975 she took stylish photographs documenting the movers and shakers in the British arts, fashion, politics and high society.

Her breakthrough came with the ability to take colour photographs using a new technology called Vivex. Invented by Colour Photography Ltd of Willesden, it entailed overlaying three negative plates using the primary colours of cyan, magenta and yellow. 

The Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne is showing 150 examples of her work until April 20. 

As camera equipment and development in the 1920s and 30s were primarily studio-bound, Yevonde concentrated on taking colour portrait photographs. The prints were then sold to wealthy clients who had an interest in the subject sitting for her.

She obviously had a remarkable knack of putting her subjects at their ease with a huge variety of poses, costumes, and facial features with a high proportion of subjects gazing sidewards into the middle distance. It must have taken hours to arrange them in this way.

Colour portraiture

Business was good. Yevonde’s career coincided with an explosion in demand for pictures and photographs in newspapers and magazines. This was the post-First World War age of increased literacy and the cinema.

Of course, the most obvious thing to note was that Yevonde was a woman, a pioneering one at that, operating in a man’s world.

The exhibition doesn’t make a song and dance about this. 

Divided into chronological sections,  it effortlessly glides from her experimental beginnings through to her later years when she declared she “would like to pull her horns” from day to day photography.

Experimental photography such as 'double-headers'

Celebrities of their day such as George Bernard Shaw, Vivien Leigh, the Earl and Countess of Mountbatten and John Gielgud are all captured on camera at this show. In amongst them are dozens of portraits from a bygone age of aristocrats, high society figures, debutantes and actresses.

But then there came a change. During the Second World War the invention of Kodachrome killed off the Vivex colour photography labs overnight. Kodachrome was more advanced, easier to use and, importantly, enabled colour photography in the field, not restrained by studio-bound kit.

The demise of Vivex signalled the end of Yevonde’s unique brand of colour portraiture.

However, the exhibition continues to show her post-war output with a range of fascinating work including a surrealist spell and black and white studies of swinging sixties intellectuals and influencers of their day.

“Be original or die” was Yevonde’s battle cry. This exhibition certainly shows why.

 

 The hundred year old mahagony radio box

Made out of mahogany, box was designed to hold the Gecophone crystal radio set, first made by the General Electric Company in 1923.

Unfortunately, there is no radio set inside my box:

 

If there were, it would look like this, here's one taken from a science museum: