SGM-FX insights

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 […]

New Zealand   News just out that NZ is opening its borders 2 months early at the end of July. Named as the best politician in the world at the height of the pandemic, PM Jacinda Ardern is not riding so high now with flagging polls on the back of her don’t care economic regime […]

US Dollar   The USD is more than buoyant on the back of the Federal reserve’s tough anti-inflationary talk and is at a 2 year high against other major currencies. The EUR is also suffering at the hands of a closer than expected French Presidential Election this weekend as we described on Wednesday. EUR/USD 1.0895. […]

Tighter by the Minutes   Yesterday the market got a closer look at the thoughts of the Federal Reserve, the United States’ monetary authority. This central bank, whilst not the first to highlight increasing inflationary risks and adjust the policy outlook accordingly, is now arguably the forerunner of post-pandemic policy change. Whilst still in the […]