Beat the street: jobs; GM; AT&T taps Ericsson

(Partial Video Transcript)

Slight decline in Wall Street trading

Hello, I'm Angeline Ong, and welcome to beat the street, the show that gives you all the tradeable news and data ahead of the Wall Street Open. Coming up, US stocks are in focus as investor optimism gets put to the test ahead of a key week of job data.

Meanwhile, trust issues: General Motors’ Cruise robotaxi, the units could face fines for misleading a regulator over an accident. And AT&T tapped Ericsson to revamp its wireless network, housing Nokia. More on that story in just a moment.

Good afternoon, I'm Angeline Ong, and welcome to this new edition of beat the street. Not long now before Wall Street starts trading, let's just have a look at how it's shaping up. And we are seeing a slight decline there, indicated ahead of the Wall Street Open.

Year-end rally falling from heights

And a similar story there for the US Tech 100 as well, which is the NASDAQ. Not a surprise, though, because we have seen this big climb, as you can see there, this year-end rally in play still pretty much, although it is coming off those high levels.

Now, just checking in on the US 500 for you as well. We've got that key Friday job number just ahead. We've also got two indicators expected a few hours from now.

We've got the US ISM services purchasing managers index (PMI) data for November, which is expected to rise to 52 from 51.8. And the job data as well, the number of job openings expected to stay, to fall by 253,000 compared to last month to around 9.3 million.

Now, just showing you the US 500, which is pretty much the S&P 500 there, because Citi has come out saying that it sees a high risk of S&P 500 short covering. This is in its latest weekly look at positioning across futures markets.

Can CAD’s rally against the USD be sustained?

And Chris Montagu, which is the global head of quant research at Citi, said that this means the risk for short covering for the S&P 500 is elevated. Now, the recent oil weakness saw the downtrend in the US dollar versus the Canadian dollar, according to IG's chief market analyst, Chris Beecham, who joins me now with more.

The recent weakness in oil prices has begun to take a chance out of the Canadian dollar after a recent recovery for the Canadian currency against the US dollar. We're watching to see whether this can be sustained if the US dollar has got more upside ahead of it, really building on the uptrend from the summer lows.

That very much depends on what the oil price does over the next few days, but also those US job numbers we're expecting on Wednesday and Friday. If you get stronger numbers from the US economy, maybe you could expect a bit more upside in the dollar CAD in the short term, leading to a recovery of some of the recent losses.

Now, one big story out of the US, AT&T choosing Ericsson to build a telecom network using a new cost cutting technology that will cover 70% of its wireless traffic in the US by late 2026.

Now, the $14-billion five-year deal will boost Ericsson's share in one of the biggest telecom players in the world and erode the presence of rival Nokia in the North American market.

[…]