A Quiet Start To an Interesting Week

It has been a quiet start in the markets today with the overriding theme being the general USD strength seen across all pairs. Almost all currencies, including the euro and the pound were lower against the US dollar. But there was not much news over the weekend to support this move and so it can be considered more of a consolidation and a continuation of the moves from last Friday rather than anything fundamental. Another point to note has been the fact that the moves have been broad but not deep and hence have not changed the prices by much in any specific pair.

The only bit of news over the weekend and today concerns the oil price which was lower due to comments from Iraq which refused to tag along with the decision of the OPEC producers to cut production output. They wanted to be exempt from the production cuts but still wanted the cuts to continue being done by others. It is indeed as quirky as it sounds, no doubt.

For today, we do not have much of news from any part of the world today but the lowering oil prices seemingly benefits the USDCAD pair which continues on its uptrend due to the weakening data from Canada which shows the real effect of the low oil prices on their economy. But the week ahead promises a lot as there are a lot of quarterly earnings releases scheduled for this week from some big names like Apple and Alphabet and this is likely to affect the SP500 index which will in turn have an impact on the other markets. It will also give us a hint on the strength of the US economy and tell us how far down the road the impending rate hike would arrive.
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