Summary:
- US500 near its highs after strong weekly gains
- Canadian jobs miss weighs on CAD
- Cryptocurrencies fall lower
- May WASDE release impacts grains
The final economic release of note for the week has shown a slight pick for the US consumer with the Uni Mich figure beating forecasts. The University of Michigan consumer confidence index came in at 98.8, marginally better than the 98.4 expected. The print also included an upwards revision to the prior reading, which now stands at 98.8 after being adjusted up from 97.8.
The US500 gained following the release and moved up to its highest level of the week above 2730. The DE30 has pulled back a little today, but it has also enjoyed good gains since Monday with the benchmark remaining around the 13000 level heading into the weekend.
On the face of it the latest employment figures from Canada are something of a disappointment, but upon closer inspection they are actually pretty solid. The headline employment change for April showed an unexpected fall of 1.1k vs 17.8k expected and a prior reading of 32.3k. The market reaction has seen CAD drift lower after the release, with USDCAD rising from its lowest level in almost a month prior to the data dropping.
In the past 24 hours the capitalization of the cryptocurrency market dropped significantly from $437.7 billions to $390 billions, according to the CoinMarketCap.com. All the major coins took a hit with Bitcoin price sliding beneath the $8800 handle. There’s not much by the way of news to explain the decline but it does appear now that from a technical point of view the outlook for Bitcoin has soured somewhat and further downside may lie ahead.
The US Department of Agriculture released on Thursday its monthly report concerning global supply and demand trends among agriculture commodities. Even as prices of the three mentioned grains did not change too much after the release, the May WASDE print seems to paint quite a promising backdrop especially for soybean. Despite this all these markets are actually trading lower today and in the red at the time of writing.