Japan current account balance ¥1653.1b in September USDJPY relatively flat after the data crossed the wires Data may have limited implications for BOJ policy bets Stay updated with major releases on our calendar USDJPY remained relatively flat after Japan’s Ministry of Finance released the country’s current account balance for September. The data topped estimates coming in at a surplus of…
Everyone loves a bull market, and it seems that almost everyone fears a bear market. Not me… I love them both. In fact, I especially love it when stocks, or bonds, or commodities, or just about any asset class, goes down. That’s because I make what I call “easy money” (and a lot of it) by flipping…
It was back in March of this year that a suspicion of oil located in Israel’s Golan Heights was reported and flocks of onlookers dashed to the site to see it with their own eyes. It took over a year of round-the-clock drilling but Israel announced Wednesday the discovery of enough oil to make the…
(T2108 measures the percentage of stocks trading above their respective 40-day moving averages [DMAs]. It helps to identify extremes in market sentiment that are likely to reverse. To learn more about it, see my T2108 Resource Page. You can follow real-time T2108 commentary on twitter using the #T2108 hashtag. T2108-related trades and other trades are occasionally posted on…
Foreign equities have had a strong run over the past week (5 trading days), with most of the major regional markets besting US stocks, based on a set of ETFs in unhedged US-dollar terms. Is this a sign that the ex-US equity space is due to outperform? Maybe, although there’s still plenty of ground to…
2015 has been a bad year for both soft and hard commodities. Notably, S&P GSCI Total Return – the benchmark for commodity market performance – nosedived about 19.3% in the third quarter, representing the fifth worst quarter and the third worst third quarter since 1970. With this, the index is on the verge of recording…
If you’re like me you probably have an Oktoberfest on the horizon. The month of pumpkin-flavored everything is also the time to enjoy a smooth German beer on a sunny patio. It seems beer will always be in demand, no matter what the market or global economy does. Appropriately, a curious chart involving gold and…
The possibility of the Fed introducing an interest rate hike in the next month or two still hovers over Asian markets. Although Chinese stocks came rolling back on Thursday after its two-day holiday, Japanese markets pulled back on bad economic data and most Asian markets fell. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan lost…
The US dollar has eased to new lows for the week against the euro and yen. There does not seem to be a big fundamental driver. If anything the weakness in German exports, following as it does the soft orders and industrial output data, warns the the European locomotive may be slowing, and would seem…
Gold prices settled slightly lower on Wednesday after shuffling between gains and losses, as investors waited for the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s September 16-17 meeting to gauge the central bank’s outlook on the economy and rate policy. The XAU/USD pair initially advanced yesterday but encountered resistance around the 1154 level. As a result, the…
