It’s the final trading day of the week and month, and the dollar majors have mostly been holding within their respective Thursday ranges amid a backdrop of whippy global asset markets, which have once again turned to a risk-off positioning mode. The exception has been USDJPY, which floated to a seven-week high at 104.9 on the back of yen weakness, which saw GBPJPY lift to an 11-month high and AUDJPY to a two-day high. This price action is a break in correlation for the Yen, which historically has tended to strengthen during phases of risk aversion in global markets.
EURUSD, meanwhile, has been narrowly orbiting the 1.2100 level for a second day. The Dollar posted modest gains versus the Pound and dollar bloc, and most other currencies, though largely remained off highs seen yesterday. In stock markets, the MSCI Asia-Pacific lost over 0.5% and is set for its biggest weekly decline since last September, of nearly 4%. S&P 500 futures are showing a decline of nearly 1%, more than reversing declines seen by the cash version of the index yesterday on Wall Street. The extraordinary spectacle of retail investors coordinating, via social media, purchases of GameStop and other shares, such as Blackberry, AMC and Bed, Bath and Beyond with the specific aim of forcing hedge funds to stop out of their short positions on such stocks, has been creating volatility and drama in markets this week. The “Reddit Quartet” fell -44.29%, -56.63%, -41.63% and -36.40%, respectively.
Concerns about the SARS-Cov2 coronavirus have in the meantime increased palpably, with US vaccine developer Novavax reporting that its candidate vaccine showed only a 60% efficacy in Phase 3 trials for the South African variant, compared to a 90% efficacy for the non-South African variants. Uncertainty about the effectiveness of available vaccinations against new coronavirus variants (and how easy it would be for vaccines to be tweaked to accommodate new strains) has potential to keep markets on a wary footing until more data is available.
The Pound has pulled back from highs this week, but continues to show gains since the UK’s departure from the transitory membership of the EU’s single market and customs union. The UK currency’s perkiness has been a response to the consequence of the UK Brexiting with a deal, bringing a long-awaited end to uncertainty, as well as the UK’s ahead-of-the-game Covid vaccination program, which could see the UK government start to reverse out of restrictions as soon as mid February, when all of the most-vulnerable groups should have been vaccinated. In this context it should be noted that the Pound remains at historically weak levels by the measure of the real effective exchange rate. The Economist magazine’s Big Mac index, a more informal measure of 56 currency valuations according to the theory of purchasing power parity, shows the Pound to be 22% undervalued against the Dollar.
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Stuart Cowell
Head Market Analyst
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