SGM-FX insights

Some way to go   The Federal Reserve somewhat caught the market off guard last night. The US central bank’s efforts in recent months to tame inflation have been nothing short of extraordinary. Late out of the blocks, the Federal Reserve produced last night its fourth consecutive interest rate hike of 0.75%. These enormous, oversized […]

A return to energy   First the context of yesterday’s trading session: Thanks to some data in the United States showing a more robust backdrop than may have been expected, positions that existed across global markets speculating that the Federal Reserve would have to take its foot off the pedal became increasingly untenable. There was […]

Reserved about Dollars   Russian President Vladimir Putin has been taking a tough line on the Dollar. He has been claiming that western foreign policy, sharped in no small part by the United States, is to blame for the rising commodity and Dollar prices globally. Even citing recent IMF figures for the Dollarisation of global […]

Full Employment   The textbook definition of full employment has an unemployment rate of 4.5%, so for Fed Chair Jerome Powell with US unemployment rate at a 50 year low of 3.5%, he will inevitably both say and signal things that will spoil the party spirit when he gets to his feet at 1500hrs London […]

Peak vs Post: the Atlantic divide   For the last few months markets have been decimated by volatility across most of the globe as authorities took aim at their mutual enemy: inflation. Whilst this has created hugely destructive dynamics across markets and still created winners and losers, there was at least one thing keeping some […]

Mountain or Molehill   Grab an economics textbook and I bet it’ll tell you that a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of nil or negative economic growth. It’s such an old and entrenched definition that to be honest I’m not even sure who came up with it in the first place. The one […]

US Dollar   Before wading through acres of analyst reports and newsprint about where the mighty USD is headed in the next few months, it is worth in the first place thinking about why the USD is strong. The answer can be distilled down into 3 main reasons which are as follows: 1. Growth potential: […]

Markets   NYMEX WTI Oil at $100 on the back of President Biden’s lack of breakthrough on his visit to Saudi Arabia to persuade his hosts to increase production plus a rising interest rate environment suggest that a Recession is more likely. Apple viewed as a good surrogate stock for the overall US corporate scene […]

Blink and you’d have missed it   I’m sure many of you had a flurry of alerts yesterday just before 2pm that for the first time in two decades a Euro was worth less than one US Dollar. However, it’s a good job those automatic headlines were pushed out because unless you’d been staring at […]

The day for parity?   Could today be the day that EURUSD hits parity? We’ve covered recently the likely scenarios that will arise and could also cause a move to 1-1 or lower reading of Euro-Dollar. However, with the world’s most traded currency pair still a couple of cents clear of the psychological level at […]

Eye of the Storm?   Last week saw the biggest drop in world stock markets for 2 years but now things have calmed down…or have they? With inflation topping out/coming down, it will allow Central Banks to ease off their recent tightening, but that does not mean that volatility will ease, in fact it is […]

Fragile   Entering market open yesterday many investors and analysts had commented on the fragility that they foresaw for yesterday’s trading session. The catalyst for the unnerved markets was the recently released US inflation data which was still not identifying a peak in price inflation that many had expected to emerge by now. As the […]