From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @IanCulley
In last week’s Currency Report, we highlighted the NZD/USD cross as a means to express our bearish US dollar thesis.
The setup was too good to resist taking a swing at following the recently failed breakdown. And so far, we’ve been rewarded for it. That’s information.
But it’s not the only cross that continues to trend well against the US Dollar. We see it all over, and it’s only reinforcing our bearish thesis.
As such, we want to look for more opportunities to take advantage of this developing theme.
In this week’s post, we’re going to do just that.
Let’s drill into our forex universe now and identify some of our favorite risk/reward setups we want to bet on to capture profits from a weakening US dollar.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza and Louis Sykes @haumicharts
Welcome to our latest RPP Report, where we publish return tables for various asset classes and categories, along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
We consider this our weekly state of the union address as we break down and reiterate both our tactical and structural outlook on various asset classes and discuss the most important themes and developments currently playing out in markets all around the world.
In our last report, we discussed all the whipsaws we had been witnessing in recent weeks and noted that the next major piece of information would be the velocity of the reactions these charts made in the opposite direction.
Of the four trade setups we identified--EUR/USD, GBP/USD, AUD/USD, and NZD/USD--the Aussie was the only one that worked.
The fact that many of those trades failed or, more specifically, were never even triggered at all, is information!
Fast forward to today and we're looking at a failed breakout in the US Dollar Index that's been confirmed by strong downside follow-through since last week. Now, it’s time to flip the book long on some of these trades to express our thesis of further USD weakness, at least over the near term.
One trade setup that stands out due to its asymmetric risk-reward profile at current levels is the NZD/USD.
Unless you’ve been stuck under a rock or at the beach all summer, this is old news. And we’ve admittedly been a bit obnoxious when it comes to rehashing this theme. But usually when we find ourselves harping on something, it's because it's a big deal.
Our own behavior can be fantastic information, and it's become a part of our process to pay special attention whenever we begin to repeat ourselves a lot.
This week is no different, as the US Dollar Index $DXY provides another example of the market’s sloppy state of affairs.
Just when we thought we might finally have some decisive price action in the Dollar, Friday’s attempted breakout followed by Monday’s weakness is casting some serious doubts.
Was last week’s breakout above the March pivot highs valid?
Or was it just another failed move to add to the market’s growing list of whipsaws and fake-outs?
Welcome to our latest RPP Report, where we publish return tables for various asset classes and categories, along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
We consider this our weekly state of the union address as we break down and reiterate both our tactical and structural outlook on various asset classes and discuss the most important themes and developments currently playing out in markets all around the world.
In our last report, we pounded the table on our position that markets are a total mess these days. Another theme we hit on was how many significant risk assets were trading at or below critical levels of overhead supply.
Where the USD heads next will have wide-ranging implications across asset classes by either providing a tailwind for risk assets or a headwind in the case it resolves higher from its year-to-date range.
But, as the market continues to chop sideways, we want to direct our attention to one of the most important risk gauges in the currency market.
That’s the Aussie-Yen.
In this week’s post, let’s check in on the AUD/JPY to see what information we can glean regarding risk appetite and what it could mean for other markets.
Welcome to our latest RPP Report, where we publish return tables for a variety of different asset classes and categories along with commentary on each.
Looking at the past helps put the future into context. In this post, we review the absolute and relative trends at play and preview some of the things we’re watching to profit in the weeks and months ahead.
We consider this our weekly state of the union address as we break down and reiterate both our tactical and structural outlook on various asset classes and discuss the most important themes and developments currently playing out in markets all around the world.
From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza and Ian Culley @Ianculley
The US Dollar Index $DXY has been a good reminder that price doesn’t always move in a straight line.
Paul Tudor Jones has been quoted saying “markets only trend about 15% of the time.” The textbooks will tell you it’s somewhere between 20% and 30%. But it all comes down to how you’re measuring it.
We think it’s fair to say most markets trend about 25% of the time on a structural basis.
And the present year two market conditions have been a great illustration of what they look like the other 75% of the time… range-bound... sideways... a hot mess.
Speaking of which, last week, we pointed out that Dollar strength had stalled and that things were beginning to look messy on shorter time frames.
A little more than a month ago, we began to see broad-based strength in USD emerge on both a short and intermediate-term basis.
Since then, it’s been the central theme in currency markets.
But we're starting to see signs that this near-term US dollar dominance could be fading as bulls have had ample opportunity to push the USD higher in recent months but have made little progress.
The lack of follow-through can be seen in our long USD trade ideas from late June, as most are not working. We recently saw many crosses reach our risk level, but price rebounded instead of triggering an entry. The EUR/USD is a great example of this.
We're going to flip the script a bit this week with our RPP Report. We typically don't publish a report during week's where we have a monthly conference call as JC covers our positioning and summarizes our key themes and views there.
But we didn't do one last week either because we had just published our Q3 Playbook which laid out our current position in a painfully detailed manner (it was 250 pages!).
In today's post, we're simply going to recap our "Key Themes For The Current Quarter" and update clients on some major developments that have taken place in the past few weeks.
We've got some important things to cover so let's get right to it!