Summary:
- Brent Oil turns red on the year after US inventories and production both rise
- Technical overview Oil.WTI
- US stocks build on yesterday’s gains
- Wall Street earnings season at midpoint
- Bitcoin recaptures 8000 level
- RBNZ rate decision at 8PM
The Oil price has taken a turn for the worse this afternoon after the latest economic data showed a rise in the DOE inventories whilst US production overtook that of Saudi Arabia! The weekly DOE release showed a build of 1.9M barrels and whilst this was less than both the consensus forecast of 3.2M and the prior reading of 6.8M it was well above last night’s API print which showed an unexpected drop of around 1M.
A technical overview for Oil.WTI can be found here
Tuesday’s session marked a decent comeback for US stock as the pandemonium from the start of the week subsided and indices looked to recover some of the declines and today’s trade has seen some further gains. SNAP is one of the hottest stocks after posting an explosive growth in revenue and the share price has increased by almost 40% on the day so far!
More than a half of the S&P 500 companies have already published their financial reports for Q4 2017 and it is worth to take a look on the earnings of the US stocks. Whilst this has been somewhat overlooked in recent days with the wild swings in the broader index, the earnings offer a key insight into the fundamentals of the firms and ultimately will drive long term moves.
As per our analysis we provided yesterday the Bitcoin price gained a foothold after making its lowest point a touch below $5900. Since then, the price has already neared $8000 breaking at the same time a key short term resistance placed at $7200. From a technical standpoint one may forecast subsequent gains if the cryptocurrency manages to stay above the mentioned resistance/support.
The last time the Reserve Bank of New Zealand moved interest rates was November 2016 and it will not change today as the bank is widely expected to keep all rates on hold. In turn, the latest statement of the bank presented in November 2017 turned out to be more upbeat as the bank chose to revise time for the first rate hike from Q3 2019 to Q2 of the same year. The rate decision and statement are due out at 8PM (GMT) and the press conference with newly appointed Adrian Orr at 9PM could also be worth watching for NZD traders.