Summary:

  • Major European stock benchmarks post moderate declines

  • Cryptocurrency market bleeds

  • USDCAD declines ahead of the Canadian jobs report

The early trading on Friday was marked by the underperformance of the stock indices from Western Europe. Swedish krone is the top performer from the G10 basket while USD erases some of its recent gains to trade as the biggest laggard among majors. Precious metals advance while oil is trading rather flat. Canadian jobs report scheduled for release in the early afternoon is the main macroeconomic event of the day therefore CAD traders should get ready for additional volatility.

The US Department of Agriculture released on Thursday its monthly report concerning global supply and demand trends among agriculture commodities. In today’s analysis we would like to focus on grains: wheat, corn and soybean as they remain still vastly undervalued markets.

In an interview with CNN Adena Friedman, the CEO of Nasdaq, expressed her positive attitude towards cryptocurrencies. She said that in her opinion digital assets play an important role in the economy of the future. Moreover, she expressed that in her opinion the well established markets will be the last ones to broadly embrace blockchain technology.

Investors on Wall Street ended the Thursday’s session in a solid rise adding almost 1% nevertheless their European counterparts did not share so rosy moods at the beginning of trading. In fact, it was a lacklustre start to Friday’s trading, and the major indices stayed flat or even dipped.

It’s been a quiet session across major currencies with the EURUSD moving literally nowhere, but still trading above a 1.19 mark. The Asian session did not bring any macroeconomic releases of note except one from the New Zealand economy regarding manufacturing PMI.

It’s been choppy trading for the Loonie so far this week, and the final day does not seem to be a whole lot different given a print from the labour market we got. A net change is forecast to total 20k being largely driven by full-time employment.