Morning Roll Call

As the USA markets stumbled into action (after the long bank holiday weekend) it was the Canadian loonie that took centre stage in early FX trading, by reaching a low point versus the dollar not seen since 2009. Looking at the commitment of trader’s report of last week there did seem to be a ‘telegraphed’ […]

The USA markets were closed on Monday due to their bank holiday in recognition of Martin Luther King. As a consequence the markets were relatively quiet throughout the day as the two main trading sessions concentrated on Europe singularly. However, despite there being very little in the way of high impact news events published on

A very interesting study, regarding the state of many European banks, was published across several of the wires during Thursday. Reuters were citing academic research from Berlin suggesting that, in order to survive the upcoming stress tests the ECB will subject banks to, the banks might need up to one trillion USD in order to

Optimism was in evidence on both sides of the Atlantic in Wednesday’s trading sessions with Europe particularly bullish as Germany’s main DAX index once again posted a record high. The reason for European bullishness was for two reasons; the Euro area posted a very encouraging trade surplus of €17.1 billion in November 2013, in November

Tuesday witnessed a bullish mood enveloping both European and USA markets, with the main USA indices gaining much of the ground lost over recent days. The USA markets were not only buoyed by thin positive data, but by the narrative contained in a speech from a member of the FOMC, Plosser, who stated that the

USA markets slumped on Monday as the dollar fell to its lowest level in three weeks versus many of its major peers. The reason for the selloff is that analysts are expecting retail sales for the USA to be disappointing when they’re printed today, Tuesday January 14th. The knock on effect is that (as a

Employment and unemployment numbers were the big news events on Thursday for the USA and the news was very positive, particularly the ‘Challenger Report’ which announced the lowest level of layoffs since 1997, a quite incredible and very welcome bullish statistic. Further the USA weekly unemployment numbers came in slightly better than forecast, with 15,000

The ADP private payroll data from the USA came in ahead of expectations on Wednesday at 238K jobs created in December, with an anticipation of 199K. This print is adding to belief that the NFP number, to be printed this Friday, will also ‘surprise’ the market with a better than forecast print. The anticipation is

The DJIA pushed back through the critical 16500 handle on Tuesday as a much better than anticipated balance of payments print for the USA cheered American investors. The market was expecting a print of circa $40 billion as a deficit, but the figure came in at $34.3 billion and looking at historical precedents it’s a

Two economic indices for the USA came in below expectations leading to a muted session on Wall St. with the main indices selling off moderately. The ISM non-manufacturing print came in at 53, whilst the Markit services PMI came in at 55.7. These poor prints also partly led to a selloff in the USD for