The USD is modestly higher
As the North American traders enter for the day, the NZD is the strongest and the GBP is the weakest. The USD is modestly higher. Overall, the ranking of the strongest to the weakest are scrunched together and changes relative modest overall. The EURUSD is down banging on the 1.2000's door (a natural support level) . THe GBPUSD sniffed the converged 100/200 above and decided against going that way, and trades back toward the low from yesterday at 1.3610. Recall that level was also the low going back to January 26th. US stocks are mixed in pretrading (Amazon and Google are up strong after beating last night), gold is unchanged, oil is higher (oil inventory data will be released this morning) and yields are also higher. Lots of Fedspeak today.
Looking at the ranges and changes below, the inactivity can be seen in the ranges (lower graph) as the GBPUSDU range of 65 pips is still way below its 22 day average. The USDJPY, USDCHF and AUDUSD are all below 30 pips for the day. Even the EURUSD which has trended to the downside is confined in a 45 pip range (held up by the 1.2000 level). The good news is there is room to roam given a push.
In other markets:
- spot gold is trading down $0.30 or -0.2% at $1837.71
- spot silver is up $0.25 or 0.97% $26.93
- WTI crude oil futures are up $0.55 of 1.0% of $55.32. The private crude oil inventories showed a drawdown of -4.26M barrels vs. -2.4M est.
- bitcoin is trading up $514 or 1.4% of $36,194
in the premarket for US stocks, the major indices are mixed with the Dow down modestly. The NASDAQ index is up on the back of higher earnings from Amazon and Google:
- Dow industrial average -18.48 points
- NASDAQ index up 86 points
- S&P index up 10 points
in the European debt equity market, major indices are up for the 3rd consecutive day this week:
- German DAX, +0.48%
- France's CAC, +0.23%
- UK's FTSE 100, +0.1%
- Spain's Ibex, +1.2%
- Italy's FTSE MIB, +2.6%
In the US debt market the snapshot of rates currently shows a move to the upside with a steeper yield curve. The 2-10 year spread is up to 99.8 basis points after cracking the 100 level to 100.32 earlier in the session. That is up from 98.31 at the close yesterday. The steeper yield curve has been helping financial stocks of late:
In the European debt market, yields are mixed with Germany, France, UK yields higher and Spain, Italy, and Portugal yields lower. The changes are relatively modest with the exception of Italy where yields are down -6.8 point basis points basis points as they try to form a new government under the leadership of former ECB Pres. Mario Draghi. Investors are sharing the move.
