Good morning, it's Paul here with Thursday's SCVR.
Estimated timings - I'm working early today, so should be finished by 1pm official finish time.
Edit at 12:20 - I need a break now, as my eyes are struggling after looking at screens since 6am. Will finish off the last 2 company sections after lunch, so revised finish time of 3pm.
Edit at 14:21 - today's report is now finished. I've dropped LOOK from the list, because it doesn't interest me, and I've got something more important to do some work on.
Preamble
Judging from the positive comments and much higher thumbs ups here, you seem to like it when I do more general market commentary, that seems to be what you want! Therefore I'm refocusing on doing more of that, when there's something interesting to say, and spending less time on those company results that I find uninteresting. I'll still be doing the deeper looks into companies of interest. That suits you, and suits me too!
CNBC - Given that we're living in unique times, Graham and I should be covering the more general economic situation & outlook. As one commentator on CNBC (which I have running in audio in the background, all afternoon/evening) said, this is the first ever "engineered collapse of the economy" - a very apt phrase I think. Jim Cramer drives me up the wall, trivialising the subject matter, and I can't even understand what he's saying a lot of the time, but many of the other CNBC commentators are excellent. Above all, it guides me as to the big picture in the USA, and I've made good money from soaking up news & views on CNBC.
Yesterday was a good example - I woke up to another thumping great loss on my Dow short, with it up about 200 points pre-market. It soon became clear to me that, even though this was supposed to be a hedge, I couldn't take any more pain on it, and the market seemed likely to keep going up. So I banked the loss, closing my short, flipped it round and went long instead, By the close of play, the Dow was up 500 points, and I'd recouped all my previous loss. When it ran out of steam, I closed the long just before the closing bell at 9pm UK time, and went short…
