United Kingdom

S&P futures are flat, still spooked by the WSJ's report that Gary Cohn will not be the next Fed chair, while both European stocks and Asian shares gain in a overnight session on edge in which everyone is looking forward to today's main risk event: the ECB meeting and Draghi press conference due in under two hours. The dollar continued to weaken against most G-10 peers as tensions over North Korea, concerns over Stan Fischer's resignation and the increasingly cloudy Fed outlook outweighed positive sentiment from the US debt ceiling extension.

A UK co-living company has announced that it will begin accepting down payments made in bitcoin, according to CoinTelegraph, making it that much easier for traders hooked on effortless, outstanding returns to speculate in another bubble-prone market: UK housing.

Yesterday morning, with the US closed for holiday but with S&P futures trading modestly lower on the latest set of North Korean geopolitical fears, we asked "is this time different", referencing last week's similar setup, when futures gapped lower on Monday after the Kim regime shot a missile over Japan, only to surge into the end of the week.

Authored by John Lanchester via The London Review of Books,

With payrolls looming (our full preview is here), carbon-based traders around the globe are leery of putting on any major trades and so the overnight session has been rather dull, dominated by the now traditional overnight algo-mediated levitation, which means the VIX is lower and S&P futures are once again modest higher as European and Asian shares continue their ascent.