In this morning’s London forex session initial focus was on the Aussie dollar following the data release overnight for employment, and which wrong-footed many traders as the data appeared excellent, yet the Aussie dollar sold off strongly. This is a facet of fundamental news many forex traders fail to appreciate, simply taking the headline numbers at face value and then trading accordingly. In fact, whilst the numbers appeared to be good with employment coming in at 42.3 against a forecast of 16.1, drilling into the data revealed that most of this gain in jobs was for temporary positions, not full time. Combine this with a rise in the headline unemployment rate from 5.1% to 5.2% and the news was then viewed in the correct context.
Moving to the charts themselves and one of the great workspaces to use both time based and non-time based charts with the currency strength indicator as the starting point for any analysis. And here we saw a nice move lower in the GBP/JPY on the 3-minute chart following the expected volatility during the London open, with the renko chart remaining firmly red throughout. On the 30-minute chart, the pair is also testing the S4 level of the Camarilla Levels indicator, an important level and one which when breached opens the way for a deeper move to the S5 and S6 levels.
Finally, today sees some big option expiries, most notably on the EUR/USD with a 2.5bln and also on the AUD/USD with over 1bln.