Forex recap and the week ahead : NZD/USD

While NZDUSD continued its bearishness last week, it showed a strong move up on Wednesday to produce a Thursday high. However, it sold off very quickly as it continued its drop during Thursday's London and New York sessions.

The pair mostly consolidated on Monday and Tuesday. NZ Unemployment Rate report was the only high impact news coming from New Zealand last week but failed to affect a substantial move, and the NZDUSD kept inside of Monday’s range. 

Last week, the big fundamental impact came from the US, which had FOMC on Wednesday and Non-Farm Payroll on Friday. The former event is what finally broke the pair out of its range, pushing up over 130 pips in just a couple of hours. As noted above, the pair quickly reversed this climb and eventually ended the week lower by 0.77%. The NZDUSD has now racked up a monthly loss of just over 7.00%. The next two worst performing pairs on the monthly time scale are the GBPUSD and the AUDUSD, down by 5.63% and 5.48%, respectively.

In the chart, we see the weekly opening price, and last Thursday’s high noted. In the bottom window, we see the Stochastic indicator from TradingView. 

Traders who use this indicator will try to look for overbought or oversold areas in price - gauging whether a sell or buy is unfolding when the indicator is showing extremes on either end of the window. It could also be used for divergence as we see a few hours before FOMC news. The indicator did not make a lower low, while the NZD/USD moved slightly lower than the low made in the previous session.

Next week’s high impact events

Events relating to the NZDUSD this week are the numerous speeches by US Federal Reserve officials. President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Raphael Bostic, speaks on Monday and Tuesday, likely to further dampen hopes for a 75 basis points hike from the Fed in June. The more hawkish officials such as John C. Williams (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) and Christopher Waller (Board of Governors) take the mic after Bostic, potential building a case against Bostic’s and Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s dovishness.

Thrown in the mix this week is the US Inflation Rate YoY for April. This report is due on Wednesday (UTC+4) and is expected to fall closer to 8.0% from 8.5% in March.