A kneejerk reaction in the financial markets to the Fed’s statement has greatly ignored the general direction that the Fed said it is taking – and the way the USD is still headed. With markets currently paying low attention to fundamentals and too much attention to soundbites, as confused as Janet Yellen may have sounded in her statements, the truth is that:
- The Fed did not raise rates at this meeting, as was largely expected, but it did not take them lower, either
- The Fed said that it is still planning to raise rates twice more this year (not three times more, as previously intended, but twice more, nevertheless)
- The Fed cited global tensions in its list of concerns – China, emerging market debt, oil, etc., which were facts that we all already knew about
- The Fed remains the only large central bank that is on a rate hike trend – with the ECB and BOJ testing the limits of negative interest rates, with the PBOC allowing the CNY to drop in a volatile but still downward-headed way, and with the BOE not taking chances with the possible hard impact that a coming ‘Brexit’ poses, and which a rate hike would only heighten
The Fed announcement has sent gold and oil higher – which have essentially recovered from their pre-Fed precaution-led losses. The EUR has staged an instant but short movement against the USD, but no dramatic changes occurred in the forex markets.
Ridge Capital Markets believes that, when the noise clears away from the markets, traders and investors will realize that the Fed remains hawkish: wanting to hike rates two times more this year, with April possibly being the next turn, which can be expected to support the USD’s strength.
The BOJ’s Kuroda has, in the meanwhile, said that, contrary to what he stated earlier this week, Japan is ready to take its negative rates deeper down into that awkward territory. So the USD is on a rate-hike way, whereas the JPY is on a negative rate spiral. The same can be said about the EUR, which is in the negative rate universe and in a QE-mood, whereas the USD is on its way up, based on rate hike expectations and its current QE-off state. This means that there is a very probable profit to be made in going long USD/JPY and USD/EUR.
As for gold, the fundamentals are certainly very good, but, with its price action being mostly determined by electronic gold (where demand is not spectacular) and not by Bullion (where demand is definitely impressive), its next steps are very unpredictable. Gold’s current bullish trend supported by good technical patterns may continue to go upwards, also backed by the instability in the world and the war on cash. However, it may come down and lose its steam, since, after all, the USD bull market is still fundamentally intact – and gold is very much influenced by the performance of the USD. So trading gold in the short-term is not the best idea.
One another point that Ridge Capital Markets highlights is that the recent strength of emerging currencies, especially those of oil producing nations, such as the MXN, is likely to fade, not only based on an expectable USD recovery but also based on a non-event in the always repeated ‘Oil Production Freeze Agreement’ that never was and may never be – and which would be meaningless, even if it would come to happen, because only a production cut can help oil. A freeze, alone, wouldn’t do it.