It’s been a perfect storm for the USD bears today as the USD plummeted against major pairs and commodities. For some time the USD has been quite weak and major pairs have capitalised on it when possible, however there has been a major weather event recently with Hurricane Harvey causing major flooding and causing a large amount of damage, and also another storm likely to hit and impact Florida. Couple to this the huge backlog of political work that needs to be done by the end of the month and you can see why markets are not happy with the current US situation. The major bearish sign though was the durable goods orders m/m which fell to -6.8% (-2.9% exp) which gave the dollar bears another chance to dump the USD.
No where was this felt more than the commodity currencies which surged higher on the back of the USD weakness. After recent bearish behaviour after the last few months the NZDUSD has surged higher today on the back of the weaker USD, and also positive Australian outlook from the Reserve Bank of Australia. The push upwards today was very strong and cracked through the trend line before hitting resistance around the 20 day moving average. The bears have since pushed it back down but the new daily candle is searching to find weakness and it may find it with the current weak USD. I’m not sure how much further it can however rise, but resistance at 0.7323 and 0.7400 are likely to be strong targets for traders in the market. If we do see a fall back down the charts and the trend continuing then I would expect to see support at 0.7219 and 0.7157 be the focus.
Oil has surged today on the back of a number of key things. Firstly there are talks that Saudi Arabia and Russia are looking to extend further rate cuts. Additionally, the USD has been somewhat weaker and this always leads to a rise in the value of oil in the short term. Further adding to this is the fact that refineries in the US are starting to come back into full swing, and there demand for oil products will increase to make up for lost ground – if they’re not already at full capacity. US oil inventory data would normally be the next thing also to focus on for oil traders but due to the US public holiday it’s going to be a day later than normal.
Technical traders will be focused on the failure of oil to break through resistance today at 48.82. For some time now there has been a bearish expectation for the market and it had been trending lower, but the last few days have seen jumps and expectations are the bulls might be looking to take control again. Certainly oil is big on trending, but each wave has been weaker. If the market fails to break and hold above 48.82 then I would expect it to swing lower to 46.50 and 45.47.