Forex news for Asia trading Monday 16 November 2015

Monday:

Weekend:

The cowardly murders in Paris dominated Friday evening and weekend news flows and led to risk aversion moves as markets sequentially opened on Monday.

On local bourses, as they opened for cash trade, it was a story of lower openings, followed by some some recovery and stabilisation. Equity futures markets for cash markets not yet open, the S&P500 e-mini, for example, followed a similar pattern, a lower opening followed by partial recovery and stabilisation,

Currencies, of course, opened for trade before all, with the very early New Zealand market being the first to come fully online. This trading saw expected risk-aversion trade, to greater or lesser extents, with flows into yen and CHF, and a large impact on EUR. EUR/USD lost around 80 or so points from late Friday highs, with EUR crosses mainly a similar story.

EUR/USD has bounced somewhat, but its been unconvincing and it is tracking more or less sideways around 1.0720 and thereabouts as I update.

AUD is lower on the session, but not by a lot. NZD was an interesting one. It rallied on the news of Fonterra boosting their forecast for share earnings, but then fell back for little net change as I write.

Japan Q3 GDP came out, unsurprisingly, at a negative, and with very poor business capex showing, but with some positive take-aways as well, notably a slight beat for the consumer spending component and a gain for the inflation-indicating deflator. There was some chatter of declines in inventory being a positive for GDP going forward; we'll see. Yen, as mentioned, gained on risk aversion, but USD/JPY retraced much of its loss before stabilising.

Gold gained nearly $10, oil is up a few cents.

The yuan mid point was set weaker (for the yuan) for the 10th consecutive day. Weekend news is now pointing with near certainty for inclusion of the RMB into the IMF's SDR basket.

Regional equities with Shanghai closed for the lunch break:

  • Shanghai -0.51%
  • Nikkei -1.08%
  • HK -1.63%
  • ASX -0.67%