SGM-FX insights

USA-Canada Trade War In case you think that this is just a storm in a teacup and is calming down, think again: the trade war is hotting up, with Canada imposing like for like tariffs on US goods sold in Canada and 8 out of the 10 Canadian Provinces now boycotting imports of US alcohol. […]

Wobbly Warsh Wager As we wrote yesterday, Friday’s non-farm payrolls (NFP) data held quite the surprise in store. Not only was the August reading approximately triple the consensus estimate but revisions to previous forecasts meant that July’s unexpected job losses (23,000) were all-but revised away. With another day and a half of trading under our […]

Prediction Markets As we have written before this newish market sector is big- USD51 billion wagered in prediction bets in the USA last year and growing: this year it is forecast to grow to USD240 billion. Previously banned in the UK, the FCA is rumoured to be contemplating lifting that ban. Who knows, UK punters […]

O Canada “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu” was a recent bon mot from Canada’s PM Mark Carney. This may or may not have something to do with Mark Carney’s upcoming attendance at the EU State of the Union address in Strasbourg from EU Commission President Ursula Von der […]

Pathway from Junk Emerging markets have been an interesting space to watch in FX. Despite episodes of risk, the carry trade, where investors benefit from exposure to emerging markets funded by cheaper cash in developed markets, has remained immensely popular. Despite the backdrop of declining global bond prices this year making developed market assets more […]

Yen Intervention As some readers will recall from last week, we queried Treasury Secretary Bessent’s strategy of capping US Government Long Bond Yields by buying bonds. Several weeks before that, Bessent played the part of reliable boyfriend to Japan by buying JPY to prop it up in the absence of Japan raising its interest rates. […]

Walking the Warsh The key event of the 2026 Jackson Hole Symposium was undoubtedly Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh’s Speech on Friday afternoon. We wrote this week on just how desperate the market was to hear from the Fed Chair about how his central bank would tackle the challenge of persistently rising inflation. There was certainly […]

Lego Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter, started making wooden ladders and ironing boards in 1932 and that phase lasted until 1947 when the company bought its first plastic injection moulding machine that enabled it to turn out tiny plastic bricks. The popularity of Lego for children in the pre-electronic age is well known but Lego […]

(Not) What Warsh Wants The unequivocal focus of yesterday’s trading session was the deluge of data at 13:30 BST from the United States. The data included growth as well as price-level statistics, notably with the inclusion of the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation: Core PCE. Before we dive into yesterday’s data, let’s recap the economic […]

French Presidential election It may be 8 months away but pulses are beginning to race as France contemplates, well France, beyond Emmanuel Macron. The leader of the left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI) who embraces a heady cocktail of left-wing populism, radical socialism, eco-socialism and democratic republicanism is riding high in the polls but as […]

Trade Battle Leading up to last week, there had been a binary risk event priced into the Canadian Dollar. That event regarded US-Canadian tariffs and specifically, whether an agreement could be reached during negotiations to prevent tariffs being imposed by the United States on imports of Canadian goods. The initial deadline was extended by POTUS […]

China An excellent Economist magazine analysis of China’s energy pivot last weekend describes it as an electrostate as opposed to the USA under President Trump which is a petrostate. The former is focused on alternative energy and its oil buying strategy while the latter is not only fixated on pumping oil but on stopping offshore […]