Morning Bid: Tepid end to torrid November

A look at the day ahead in European and global markets from Ankur Banerjee

On perhaps the slowest trading day of the year, investors are dealing with an outage on CME Group platform affecting currencies, commodities and equities futures, spicing up what has so far been a tepid session.

While traders are able to execute trades on other platforms, CME Group's platforms are popular in the currency world. Conflicting comments have flooded the newsroom so far from the trading floor. It's either a "nightmare" or everyone needs to "calm down".

If the outage stretches well into European hours, expect people to get more concerned especially those looking to square their month-end books.

A month that brought fears over AI bubble to the fore is coming to an end with investors shrugging off those worries for now, choosing instead to get excited about the prospect of an interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve next month.

That has left stocks generally upbeat this week although still on course for a monthly decline, while the U.S. dollar is headed for its worst week in four months as markets convince themselves that a rate cut is coming.

With the U.S. markets closed for the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday and set for a short trading session on Friday, investors are unlikely to place major bets (an outage may help with that too).

The economic calendar includes inflation data for France and Germany and traders will be interested in seeing where prices are headed but for now markets are focused on what the Fed is going to do next.

Traders have priced in an 85% chance of a cut in December, compared with 39% a week earlier, CME FedWatch showed. Now the pricing has switched because of the dovish tone from some of the policymakers. Who's to say it won't change if hawks come out?

Key developments that could influence markets on Friday:

Economic events: Germany import and export data for October, November inflation data for France and Germany

(By Ankur Banerjee; Editing by Sam Holmes)