Forex Blog

EUR/USD broke down through 1.5400 mark today and reached the minimum level since the 24th of March as the employment fundamentals showed some improvement compared to the March results. Dollar managed to strengthen also against pound and yen even with objectively bad macroeconomic results.

Nonfarm payrolls — one of the main indicators of the U.S. economy’s health decreased 20k in April. That’s a lot better than the 80k drop in March and 75k drop that was forecasted for April. Still, the negative reading in payrolls is a clear sign of the recession danger. Unemployment rate was reported at 5% — below 5.1% in March and 5.2% expected for this month, but that indicator usually isn’t very accurate.

Factory orders jumped up significantly in March — they rose 1.4%, after a 1.3% decrease in February.

Dollar failed to sustain the growth that it has been showing recently and today it fell down against euro to 1.5662 from the opening at 1.5621. Although it tried to rally again earlier today, traders didn’t felt that positive about the U.S. currency.

Factory orders in February disappointed the market participants — they fell 1.3%, while the consensus forecast was at -0.8%. Still this decline was better than the January’s 2.3% fall (revised down from 2.5%).

Crude oil inventories grew significantly in U.S. last week — they increased 7.3 million barrels and are in the upper half of the average range for this time of year now. This news may force oil prices to go down below $100/barrel level in a short-term perspective.

Dollar continued to lose its positions on Forex market today. After the major economic releases came out in U.S. EUR/USD touched a new absolute maximum at 1.5300 and even GBP/USD recovered from the weekly bottom, which was formed after the bad macroeconomic statistics in was released in U.K this morning.

Productivity in the non-farm sector of economy in the fourth quarter of 2007 grew faster than expected — at 1.9%, against annual average of 1.8%; the forecasts were also at 1.8% growth.

Factory orders for the manufactured goods in January fell down at the same pace as they were expected to fall — by 2.5%, that followed a month of 2.0% growth in December.

ISM non-manufacturing index unexpectedly improved in February and went up from 44.6 to 49.3, while an insignificant growth to 47.5 was expected.

Crude oil inventories brought a negative surprise the dollar bulls and the oil bears, as in the past week they declined for the first time in more than two months. They went down by almost 3.06 million barrels.

Enough with the Blogger, its glitchy publishing system and the limited settings choice. I’ve decided to move my Forex blog to WordPress, as I find it very good CMS for my needs. Of course, in the beginning there will be a lot of things messed up because of it, but now you will probably have a better experience with the whole more clean blog. And the posts will be actually posted without waiting periods of more than 10 hours (because sometimes Blogger just didn’t want my posts to be published).

As to the Forex market, not much news here today. U.S. factory orders for December rose 2.3% instead of the expected 2.4%, but it was still better than 1.5% previous value. This news probably made some difference for euro and EUR/USD rose about 30 pips up today.

Dollar started to trade higher today against euro after the productivity report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out, as it was trading against pound sterling earlier in the morning after some bearish data on United Kingdom PMI and housing were released.

Nonfarm productivity (revised value) in third quarter of 2007 increased unexpectedly well - by 6.3%. Previous value was 4.9% and the analysts’ expectations averaged at 5.8% growth. This indicator without any doubts will continue to strengthen dollar until the end of the week.

Factory orders in October also showed a growth that almost no one could see happening - 0.5%, while analysts’ consensus was at 0% stagnation.

Bad news came with non-manufacturing ISM report which showed today that November Business activity index in services sector declined to 54.1% from 55.8% in October, which worse drop than it was expected - 55.0%.

Crude oil inventories again were in the red zone, but today with a very high negative value - 8 million barrels drop compared to previous week report. Combined with today’s OPEC decision not to increase oil output, this news may hit dollar as the oil prices will surge to the new maximums.

For some strange reasons good data on October nonfarm payrolls which came out today had a very bad impact on dollar’s pricing against major currencies. With 1.4524 on EUR/USD greenback fell down to its new historical minimums as with Canadian dollar - USD is now worth only 0.9326 CAD.

Monthly nonfarm payrolls is one of the most looked at health barometers for U.S. economy. With a very weak past two month numbers (96k in September; 93k for August), report for October gave a far more better picture of the employment market - 166k new nonfarm payrolls. With the expectation averaging at 80k, this should have added to dollar’s value on Forex. Overall unemployment rate remained at 4.7% percents and will hardly move up or down until the end of the year.

Factory orders for September gave another pleasant surprise for dollar bulls increasing by 0.2%. That is compared to -3.5% in August and expectations near -0.4%.

All these positive factors could move EUR/USD back to 1.4300-1.4400 range, but instead it rallied to new historical maximums. In my opinion this can be explained only by historically high oil and gold prices. It can be almost certainly that next week we’ll see a correction on EUR/USD, in which today’s employment data will play the role of catalyst.

Following the day of not so good (rather bad) economical news from U.S. yesterday, markets were surprised by some very optimistic indicators presented today. A reaction on both stocks and Forex markets was supportive with the stocks bulls, EUR and GBP to gain and the bears with JPY and USD to lose somewhat.
Personal income and spendings number for July came out at 0.5% and o.4% growth that is higher than 0.3% expected (for both). While the core PCE inflation came a little worse than expected - 0.1% against 0.2%.
Chicago PMI - the major manufacturing sentiment index came out 53.8 level increasing from 53.4 and above the expected 53.0.
July factory orders were the main surprise - 3.7% from the 1.0% previous month and 3.0% from the expected number for July.
Michigan sentiment index reached 83.4 number - which is higher than both previous and expected numbers and is a historically high value for this index.
Overall, almost every indicator came out surprisingly high and probably gave some fuel for the future Fed’s interest rates decision.

EUR/USD today continued going flat below 1.3700 mark unsure if Euro has enough power and U.S. economy has more holes to stop Bernanke from raising the rates before the Autumn comes. This day didn’t bring a lot of macroeconomic surprise to traders, but it had its important data.
Initial jobless claims for the previous week in United States increased by as little as 4k and came out at 307k - still lower than 310k predicted - that is, the employment market remains one of the steadiest part of the U.S. economy.
Factory orders in June rose by 0.6% which is far better than the May’s number of -0.5% decline, but slightly lower than predicted growth of 1.0%. I think that this indicator will just be a little slower second half of the 2007, staying positive to provide better total GDP numbers.

Today EUR/USD retreated from its yesterday levels of 1.3630 down to 1.3600 level (with a failed try ground below 1.3600). Factory orders macroeconomic data for May came out better than expected but it still showed a decrease in this important indicator - manufacturers orders decreased by 0.5% (against 1.2% expected). But this data didn’t affect Forex at all - the major bearish bars were seen four hours before it came out. It looks like EUR/USD will remain bound in 1.3600 - 1.3650 range for some time.

Today were not the best times for USD bulls as the Factory Orders indicator increased only by 0.3% (against 0.6% expected). Low growth of manufacturing orders means a slower growth of overall economy, while U.S. economy is already slow as a turtle with 2007 GDP estimated at around 1%. Such bad macroeconomic data will push EUR/USD up, even if technical analysis will cry for a correction. On the other side, previous Factory Orders indicator was revised towards better side - 4.1% from 3.5% which might cause some support for dollar on Forex.