SGM-FX insights

US Dollar Surging on a strong US economy together with further geopolitical tensions in the past week, USD is at its strongest versus EUR this year and came within a whisker of breaking through 1.06 in yesterday’s trading. Against the Japanese Yen USD was 154.55 which caused Japanese Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki to break cover […]

Coalition This briefing is about South Africa and the Rand, which frequently proves to be one of the more divisive subjects within our roster of currencies. In particular, with the election looming, this will be about South African governance. Not from a political or human perspective about what may be the best long term outcome […]

EUR European Central Bank President Madame Lagarde made two bold statements last week: the ECB does not target exchange rates and the ECB is not dependent on Federal Reserve policy. While at one level both are sometimes true, it is brave to explicitly make those statements at a ECB press conference and more than risks […]

European Central Bank Something for everybody: the ECB as expected left interest rates unchanged but made it clear that cuts will be forthcoming now that inflation is near the target 2% rate. Brushed over is that with growth at near zero, bank lending moribund and the EU economy flat, something has to give.EUR/USD 1.0720 Japanese […]

Once, twice.. Three times a Dollar rally? With the market having been delivered a strong jobs report last week, all eyes were on yesterday’s US CPI print for greater clarity on the macro data set. As a reminder, on Friday of last week, non-farm payrolls data showed the US economy added 303,000 jobs in March. […]

France Quite simply the numbers do not add up for President Macron and his future in government, never mind La Belle France and its citizens : France is the third most indebted EU country after Greece and Italy with a debt to GDP ratio of 110.6%. In the past year the deficit has increased by […]

A long shot: ECB The ECB will deliver its latest monetary policy decision on Thursday followed by a press conference. For the first time in a long time, there is a faint prospect of an interest rate cut. At the very least, meaningful non-interest rate monetary tools, including the plethora of programs sustaining the ECB’s […]

Space Solar UK Oxfordshire based company Space Solar is on the way to creating a solar farm that will generate constant and cheap electricity….in space. The plan is to launch a 2000 tonne solar farm into space and then with a complicated system of mirrors and solar panels beam light back to Planet Earth from […]

A long shot: 2/2 Whilst it should not necessarily be read as a glowing endorsement of longer-term prospects of EURUSD, the transatlantic cognitive divide that I wrote of on Tuesday should begin to moderate. The same forces that for the past couple of years have made it relatively simple to talk up the perceived outperformance […]

Oil As we have been pointing to, oil has been edging up and is now on a 7 month high. Not it should be stressed on a rosey economic picture but rather on increasing tensions in the Middle East-the latest being the Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus.Brent: USD 88.70 Sunny Spain The […]

A long shot: 1/2 The world, in particular, the Northern Atlantic in a number of words that leaves you with some probability of reading the final sentence: no pressure then. Financial markets and FX in particular all tend to boil down to rates: interest rates, inflation rates, rates of return etc. The financial universe is […]

Quarter End For those markets, including the UK, which will be observing Good Friday, today will be the last trading session of both March and Q1 2024. This means that we should expect today to mark the final day of any major FX position adjustment. The end of a month, quarter or year brings with […]