US: Services PMI, goods trade balance and new home sales in focus - Rabobank

Philip Marey, Senior US Strategist at Rabobank, the investors focus will be on the release of goods trade balance, services PMI and new home sales data in today’s session.

Key Quotes

“In the US, the advance goods trade balance for September will be published. The Bloomberg consensus is a widening trade deficit, but we are likely to remain in the $55-65bn range that the trade deficit has moved in for most of the time since early 2011.

Today the Markit US services PMI for October will be released. The consensus expectation is a modest rise to 52.5 from 52.3. While the services PMI did much better than the manufacturing PMI in most of 2015, this year the services PMI has been dragged down to the level of the manufacturing PMI. This suggests that while initially the services sector was largely shielded from the direct impact of the external headwinds that have been hammering the manufacturing and services sectors – weak global growth, the strong dollar and the low oil price – the weakness in those sectors has spilled over to the services sector.

Finally, US new home sales are expected to lose momentum now that inventories are getting depleted due to a combination of strong sales and weak housing starts in recent months. The consensus expectation is a modest slowdown to 600K in September from 609K in August.”