With the majority of the world’s leading economies still under strict stay-at-home mandates as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, NVIDIA will strive to impress with its Q1 FY21 results on May 21. Revenue estimates ($3.182 billion), sourced from YCharts, make investors curious to see whether the company can meet those figures under the uncertain macroeconomic environment. Chipmakers have been one of the few areas that have done well over the past few weeks, and have been a key growth sector for investors. NVIDIA has been no different. Apart from the powerful graphic chips, the company has a solid data center business. However, investors should stay vigilant and ready to rebalance their positions, as the company has a sizable revenue exposure to China and the gaming revenue may slow.

During the last Fed meeting, Jerome Powell said they are ready with new credit facilities to help the economy through the slump and avoid any deflationary shock. The Fed’s outlook was murky, with the central bank committing to keep rates low until the economy was back on track. This week’s minutes should give us a greater insight into the discussions around the launching of various support programmes, including the newly-launched ETF corporate bond buying programme. Wednesday’s minutes could clarify whether the policymakers really want to rule out the prospect of negative rates. We’ve already seen the damage negative rates can do in Europe.

The COVID-19 lockdown started towards the end of March in the UK and the next few months for country jobless claims are likely to be very gloomy. The official reports stated over 1 million applications for universal credit in the last few weeks, which means that this month’s jobless claims for April are expected to show a huge jump from the 12,200 rise in March. Overall, the unemployment rate is likely to be much higher than it was a couple of months ago.

This Friday data for the UK retail sales is expected to be very poor, with consumption likely to be in a freefall. March number was a shocker, plunging to a record low of 5.1% despite the lockdown starting quite late that month.

April services PMI numbers for in France and Germany were at record lows of 10.2 and 16.2. Any improvement is likely to be limited as there has only been a slight easing of some lockdown measures. The numbers will tell us the story on Friday.