Forex Today: Speculation overshadows sentiment, dollar under pressure

FXStreet Team FXStreet

What you need to know on Friday, January 29:

The financial world gyrated around equities once again, but stocks weren’t driven by sentiment. For a change, the escalation of the Gamestop scandal led the way. To put it in a few words, individual investors pushed the share sharply higher and triggered alarms everywhere. Trading was halted in some platforms, in detriment of single investors which were spurring losses within hedge funds.

Those investors gathered on forums, turned their eyes into silver, sending the metal over 5% up intraday, which in turn, pushed oil and gold higher and dragged Wall Street alongside. This is an undergoing story, and will probably continue affecting financial markets in the next few days.

The dollar firmed up as Asian and European indexes fell but later gave up on Wall Street’s comeback. GBP/USD was the best performer, trading near its recent highs. Commodity-linked currencies recovered ahead of the close, but are at risk of resuming their declines.

The EUR/USD pair is stuck in the mid-1.21, unable to attract investors.USD/JPY has surpassed its monthly high by a few pips but lacked follow-through.

US Treasury yields ticked higher, following mostly encouraging US data. Q4 GDP came in at 4% while Initial Jobless Claims declined to 875K.

Gold was unable to hold on to intraday gains and closed the day unchanged around $ 1,843 a troy ounce. Crude oil prices also trimmed early gains, with WTI settling at $52.30 a barrel.

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FXStreet Team

FXStreet

Composed of a group of economic journalists and FX experts, the FXStreet content team produces and oversees all content published on FXStreet. It provides a purely journalistic approach to the Forex market.

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