At the end of last week, I was looking ahead to Friday’s release of Non-Farm Payrolls data. I said that if the numbers were worse than expected, this would probably trigger a sharp fall in the relative value of the U.S. Dollar.
The jobs number in fact came in considerably above expectations, at 227,000 as opposed to the anticipated 170,000. However, the rate of month-on-month change in average hourly earnings came in at a lower than expected rate. The market had been expecting a positive change (0.3%), but the result here was disappointing – an increase of only 0.1%.
The U.S. Dollar fell a little in the hours following the data releases, even though the news was not that bad, in fact it could be argued that the news was positive for the greenback. This bodes ill for U.S. Dollar bulls, in line with the old trading truism that a bearish market ignores bullish news, and vice versa. Taking the week overall, the U.S. Dollar fell practically everywhere. The currencies that performed well were the Japanese Yen and Australian and Canadian Dollars. It should be noted that the latter two, both commodity currencies, are starting to move into long-term bullish trends, particularly the Australian Dollar.
