Summary:

  • Antipodean currencies underperform on the back of equivocal Chinese data

  • Major European stock benchmarks advance after yesterday’s upbeat Wall Street session

  • Agricultural commodities advance along with oil

Tuesday’s early trading was marked by the gains of European benchmarks. Stocks from the old continent managed to move higher after decent gain was noted yesterday on Wall Street. Investors await US data that is scheduled for release in the afternoon . NZD is the biggest underperformer from the G10 group with AUD and CHF while SEK and NOK outperform. Gold and silver trade lower while aluminium extends its gains.

The most eagerly point of the UK labour market report showed that wage growth sped up during three months ending in February whereas the jobless rate managed to tick down even as all economists surveyed by Bloomberg had forecast it to remain unchanged. On the other hand, the UK economy keeps facing a weird theme when job vacancies rise, unemployment declines while wage growth remains still fairly dormant.

Majority of the main digital currencies advance today with Bitcoin climbing back above the $8000 mark after trading below it for a while. The cryptocurrency space may be benefiting from the news that one of the world’s biggest banks is eyeing a possibility of setting up a crypto trading desk.

The successful session on Wall Street yesterday along with abating geopolitical risks have helped European benchmark open higher in early trading. Having said that, the price action does not seem to send any more notable signals as the DE30 keeps moving within a short-term upward channel. Therefore, one may suspect that until either upper or lower bound is broken, price movements could be muffled.

Market participants were offered an avalanche of macroeconomic readings coming from the second largest economy in the world. The most important one GDP for the first quarter came in at 6.8% in a year-over-year basis matching economists’ expectations and showing the same rate of growth as it was during the last quarter of 2017.

As UK labour market data was already released investors now await readings concerning the state of the US housing market and industrial sector. In the evening API is going to release its weekly figures concerning oil inventories. A bunch of the Fed members are scheduled to deliver their speech today thus should be cautious as sudden moves on USD tied pairs may surface.