The day after the party and the euro is suffering a hangover. What happens now?
One good point, for my own benefit, I managed to highlight both the low and high levels in the euro over/after Draghi. I'm happy with that on a purely personal basis that I'm still reading the charts ok.
The downside is that I couldn't get in on the rally I saw coming. My platform was locking up while I was trying to buy it around 1.0975. With everything going on I couldn't be bothered to muck around so left it and thought I'd get in when it settled down a bit. 5 minutes later and wallop, we're at 1.11.
It all goes to highlight the the exercise of defining levels for any eventuality is just as important as trading them, even if you don't trade them. There's no point stewing over what might have been, we move on to what may come next.
My mini self performance review aside, we need to look at the picture now, and where the euro goes from here.
The day after a big event is always important. It gives us a great clue about how strong any moves were and whether sentiment remains strong enough to keep those moves intact.
I may be stating the bleeding obvious here but we can see that the euro isn't ready to break new ground now after Draghi. Traders reacted to the headlines yesterday and are now assessing what they actually mean for the long term.
What do we know?
The ECB is keeping their foot on the easing pedal, the market is looking for Fed hikes. That was the picture before the ECB meeting and that's the picture now. Based on that simple assessment the path for the euro should be down right? The fact that we only dropped a paltry 170 odd pips, then quickly gave it back, on all that ECB policy news is still a very big red flag for bears in my mind.
Market's don't move in straight lines though. While I feel that the downside might be the harder trade I still see some scope for the price to remain heavy. I just don't think it will be heavy enough to trouble some of the big lower levels. It may be possible that we'll see the low 1.08's again but even after the Fed has hiked and the ECB has eased, the euro still kept above last years lows.
Forget the parity talks, forget the 1.20 talk, there was plenty of that in the comments. Since the fall from 1.40 we've only managed to come close (short by 100 pips) to the 38.2 fib of that move. That's not an indication that this is a market that's prepared to fly to 1.20 just on one ECB meeting.
As I've just mentioned, even with the Fed on a hiking path and the ECB on an easing path we're not even remotely close to testing parity so forget it.
Now, here's the caveat. We may well go to 1.20 or parity, we have no control over that. What we do have control over is finding the levels the euro has to overcome to get to either of those targets.
EURUSD daily chart
The levels I highlighted yesterday are still valid, save for the Feb fib which I've deleted. 1.0830-1.0800 still marks the closest very strong support level and 1.1450 marks the higher resistance. That's our big range to play. Worry about either of those breaking before worrying about parity or 1.20.
In between those we have plenty of other levels to watch.
EURUSD 15m chart
Right now we've found support down at 1.1080. We saw 1.1075/80 play a small part yesterday and it's doing so again. That's our first major point now. It the level that has been strongest so far in halting the slide from 1.12. Other levels will need to develop if we break lower but until that happens 1.10 is like next likely candidate
1.1150 is resistance and 1.1200/15 will be hard work again.
So there's our picture. We have the intraday levels and some wider levels. Make of them what you will.