Forex news for Asia trading Thursday 26 November 2015

  • Japanese investors hunt for yield in Australian bonds: state, corporate debt now in sights
  • Japan business lobby forecasts big capex growth if government reforms
  • What does 'gradual' mean? The latest financial market obsession
  • Australian capex data today - responses
  • Japan PM Abe: Corporate tax to be cut more than planned next fiscal year
  • PBOC's Sheng: World economy doesn't support multiple US rates rises
  • PBOC sets USD/CNY mid-point today at 6.3896
  • AUD sold after the capex data, where are the offers now? And ... why?
  • Higher wages on the way in Japan? Keidanren head to call 4 higher pay
  • Australian Private Capital Expenditure survey for Q3: -9.2% q/q (expected -2.9%)
  • Here's why a simple rules-based Fed monetary policy wouldn't work. Do you agree?
  • Goldman Sachs insider trading charges - how he did it
  • The 5 technical analysis and fundamental reasons to stay short EUR/USD
  • NZ October trade balance: -936m (expected deficit of 1bn NZD)

New Zealand trade balance data kicked off the session, with a lower than expected result for all 3 of the trade deficit, exports and imports results. The main market focus for the session, though, was the Q3 Australian capital expenditure data, which came in a huge headline miss and an on-expectation result for the important 4th estimate of 2015/16 investment.

The Australian dollar was market lower immediately on the data, and then had minor follow through lower before steadily eating its way back toward the intraday break level.

NZD followed along higher with the AUD.

Better news out of the metals markets in Asia today; well, better prices at least. Copper and iron ore were both 3+% gainers. It might be nothing more than a bounce from heavily sold levels in US holiday-thinned markets, but for commodity exporters it was welcome nonetheless. There were headlines about that "China said to consider probe of malicious metal short-selling" may also have had an effect. Details were non-existent, but considering similar 'probes' of equity short sellers seemed to manage to halt the stock market slide a couple of months ago (nothing like the threat of a few months in a Chinese prison cell to discourage short selling, eh?) a similar impact may have applied to metals markets today.

The USD/JPY had a small, if pretty much uni-directional, range. USD/JPY ground out a small loss - headlines about of Japanese business moves to at least consider further boosting wages and capex. Hmmm ... maybe (see bullets, above).

EUR/USD eked out a subdued sideways track, USD/CHF and Cable are both barely changed on the session.

Along with the metals I mentioned earlier, gold ticked its way higher, as high as around 1075USD and its off about a dollar from there as I update. Oil is slightly up also.

Regional equities with Shanghai closed for the lunch break:

  • Shanghai +0.25%
  • Nikkei approaches 20,000, up 0.63% today
  • HK +0.99%
  • ASX +0.49%