Despite a fairly solid NFP report on Friday, AUDUSD immediately shoot higher on the slightly disappointing headline figures. Nonfarm payrolls jumped 192K in March and the unemployment rate remained at 6.7%, missing an expected 200K increase and a drop to 6.6% respectively. However, prior months numbers were revised up a total of 37K and the labour force swelled by 503K (the participation rate jumped to 63.2% from 63.0%), thus the report isn’t as bad as the headline numbers suggest.
Nonetheless, AUDUSD rocketed to around 0.9300 on the back of March’s US employment data, with the pair even briefly punching through 0.9300, before retracing back to a support zone around 0.9280. This may suggest that bears are gaining control of the pair, at least in the near-term. In saying that, we cannot rule out a push higher if price manages to gain some traction above 0.9300. After all, the pair remains in a broad upward trend (see chart).
There is a lot of data and events this week that may decide the fate of the Aussie. In Australia, the market is eyeing the release of business and consumer confidence data, home loan numbers and March’s all-important labour market report. February’s employment report massively surprised to the upside, with over 80K full-time jobs being added over the month and over 47K jobs being added overall. Another strong employment report could see the market, and the RBA for that matter, become significantly less demoralized by the prospects of Australia’s labour market.
Key fundamental events for AUDUSD this week:
- ANZ Australian March Job Advertisements Index (Monday)
- NAB Australian March Business Confidence Index (Tuesday)
- JOLTS US Job Openings (Tuesday)
- FOMC members Kocherlakota and Plosser speak (Tuesday)
- Westpac Australian April Consumer Confidence Index (Wednesday)
- Australia Feb. Home loans (Wednesday)
- FOMC March Meeting Minutes (Wednesday)
- Australia’s March labour market figures (Thursday)
- US unemployment claims (Thursday)
- China March CPI and PPI (Friday)
- US March PPI (Friday)
- US Preliminary UoM Consumer Sentiment Index (Friday)
Source: FOREX.com
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