SGM-FX insights

Carlsberg It was third time lucky for Carlsberg in their bid to capture UK soft drinks firm Britvic which has Robinsons Barley Water, J20 and Fruit Shoots among others in its stable of refreshments. Paying GBP 3.3 billion or EUR 3.9 billion at 1290p per share, this was a significant acquisition for Carlsberg. The reason […]

Second Round The second and final round of the French legislative election took place on Sunday. The results of the election are now clear. However, the consequences of such voting outcomes are still far from known. With a relatively light data calendar for the Eurozone this week ahead of the ECB decision next Thursday, focus […]

US Election Bearing in mind that the CNN poll was taken on July 2 well after the disastrous debate between Trump and Biden but it put Trump ahead at 49% versus Biden at 43%, the subsequent ABC interview with pre-advised questions for President Biden will have done little or more likely will have compounded the […]

UK Election With the UK Voting exit poll at 2200 last night confirming what all of the polls had been saying in the lead up to Polling Day, while the result was never in doubt, contained within it there will be plenty of surprises on seat changes although short term it is far too early […]

Election/Independence Day After a relatively short-lived campaign, the day of reckoning has finally arrived in UK politics. Polling stations are already open and won’t close until 10pm tonight. As FX market observers will be used to, news flow on election day is strictly controlled. Analysis of electoral items including the broadcasting of speeches and conjecture […]

US Interest Rates Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has not so much hidden behind the data at the economic summit in Sintra, Portugal yesterday but rather deployed it as a weapon against those baying for rate cuts: with inflation still half a percentage point above the target level on the Personal Consumption Expenditure index which […]

First Round Voting The first round of voting in the French general elections has passed. With it, a composed market has had a chance to analyse the prospect it once feared above all others in French politics: a possible win for the National Rally. However, with the Euro gaining ground and no sign of a […]

USD/JPY As we have written recently the Japanese Yen is on a 38 year low versus the USD. This past weekend has seen a number of comments from the Japanese authorities along the same lines as at the beginning of June when the currency pair stood at 155. The reason this is noteworthy is that […]

French Consumers In a word, they are pessimistic with leading concerns being that in the very near future their standard of living will fall, they will be able to afford to spend less and lastly that their job security will be reduced. Sunday’s French election sees the New popular Front Alliance made up of the […]

Taking profit? Looking at the data calendar, yesterday should have been a relatively quiet day for markets. Limited central bank speak, little in the way of salient statistics and limited opportunity for macro headlines was the order of the day. Despite that set up, significant moves in the US treasury market created a spillover into […]

UK Labour Government Assuming that a new Labour Government comes into power on July 5 which is becoming daily more apparent, it is still even at this late stage hard to see how the new government will act in respect of the detail behind the platitudes that have been trotted out to date by the […]

Hiccup or more? A build-up of risk is driving stresses in markets. We have seen many such episodes in the post-Covid market and rising risk premia is certainly not something new. However, it is always prudent to question whether stresses in markets are the start of something greater. Risk premia in FX has built up […]