Forex Blog

OK, the New Year is coming close and as this year is ending it’s about time to try to forecast the future of the Forex market (and some other factors that influence Forex) for the year 2008. My last forecast (for 2007) didn’t get its own post on this blog, but I must admit that it was a disastrous attempt - I thought that dollar will start to grow and it lost more than 10% against euro, I also predicted for the oil to remain below $65/barrel and it got beyond $90/barrel.

By posting my forecast to this blog I can be sure that I will be able to compare actual results with my thoughts exactly as they were. And maybe it will help some long-term traders too.

So here it is, 2008 forecast:

EUR/USD - ~4% down to about 1.4100.
GBP/USD - ~4.3% down to about 1.9100.
USD/JPY - ~9.6% down to about 101.50.
EUR/JPY - ~10% down to about 148.80.

Oil - it’s hard for me to predict this one, but judging from the outlook on growing dollar, it should remain in the $80-$120/barrel boundaries for the whole 2008. Yeah, that’s a huge range, but oil is really volatile.

Interest rates:
Fed is more likely to lower the interest rate by 1%-1.5% next year (2.75%-3.25% by the end of the year).
ECB will most probably be lowering the rates or holding them around the same level - 5-5.5% by the end of the year.
BoE will certainly cut - 3.75%-4.0% by the end of the year.
Only Bank of Japan looks bullish on the interest rates to me - 1%-1.5% by the end of 2008.

Anyway, this is just a Forex trader’s forecast, so don’t rely on it much. It would be also interesting to see your forecasts. Feel free to leave one in the comments.

Today EUR/USD hit 1.3738 mark renewing its maximum since 1995. So we are at the almost twelve years maximum now and the possibilities for going even farther are getting higher and higher. Not many reasons for such a strong Euro rally for today. The only good ones I can think of - oil prices rising and some Eurozone financial leaders speaking of support for an expensive Euro. Other than that - only some really powerful bullish speculators could EUR/USD in such a dramatical way. Anyway, it’s a good time to be in the market and get some more pips on falling dollar when EUR/USD breaks the 1.3800 level.

With an impressively high ISM Services index today’s macroeconomic data from United States was a very optimistic news for USD bulls. June ISM non-manufacturing index came out at 60.7% - 1% higher than May number, and a lot better than expected, since the negative change in ISM index was expected. Crude oil inventories for the previous week came out at a very good level too. They rose 3.1 million barrels - which will probably mean that there will be no problems for the U.S. holidays period. Initial jobless claims were a bit worse than expected (318,000 against 315,000) - but it’s not a big deal really, especially if overall unemployment data which will come tomorrow will be OK.
As for the Eurozone - European Central Bank decided to leave the interest rates at 4% - no surprise here. But they also didn’t mention any dangers of inflation, like they did before, so it might be a first sign for the end of ECB rate hike.
Bank of England increased the interest rates to 5.75% as expected. The main concern for them is still an inflationary pressure, but the biggest locomotive of the consumer prices in United Kingdom - real estate market is showing a slowdown.

EUR/USD continues on its way down and now it is a trend which must be taken to consideration even for long-term Euro bulls. Correction which has seemed to be trying to return EUR/USD back to bullish trend on 04/06 and 05/06 stopped too soon releasing EUR/USD to even deeper lows. Today on Forex EUR/USD reached new low since March and it doesn’t seem to be stopping yet. Overall there are some good data from U.S. coming almost everyday. Today - Retail Sales came out to be more than twice as higher as expected - 1.4% against 0.6%, while oil and gas reserves remained on high levels.