Strong U.S. Data Boosts Sentiment

Asian stocks are moving closer to their second-day’s high, rallying after a five-day losing streak as strengthening consumer confidence and home data out of the U.S. boosts investor sentiment.

The consumer data from the U.S. reached its highest point in five years, encouraged by improving jobs data and further gains in stocks. The consumer data rose to 76.2 this month from 69 last month. Investors are hopeful that this could translate into stronger consumer spending for the second quarter.

We also saw a positive house price release in the U.S. as the data gained by 1.12 percent in March from the recorded rise of 1.32 percent in the previous month. While this is lower than February’s gain, quarter-on-quarter it shows a marked increase.

Stocks
The AUD moved to its lowest point since Oct 2011 which brought down the Australian ASX 200 Index , it then made a rally to + 0.3 percent. In Japan the Nikkei 225 was up 1.03 percent after a data release showed the retail sector sales in Japan have dropped by 0.1 percent last month since the same time last year. While this does represent a drop for the fourth month running it also marks a slowing down of this deterioration and thus beats investor expectations of a 0.4 percent drop.

Forex
The Aussie carried on falling against its counterparts begging the question, will the government intervene? The AUD/USD pair touched almost 19 month lows. Otherwise not much movement with the currencies as risk-on trading pushed traders into the stocks. The GBP/USD dropped 0.08 percent and the USD/CAD was up 0.16 percent at time of writing.

Commodities
The precious metals saw small gains off the back of the positive data releases in the U.S. Gold was up0.5 percent and Silver 0.61 percent. Meanwhile Crude oil undid its gains following the data as investors took profit from Crude pushing the price back down.

What To Watch
Unemployment and Consumer Price Index figures are coming out of Germany during the European Session which will move the Euro stocks and currency. Then in the U.S. FOMC representative Rosengren speaks and the Interest rate will be released in Canada.