investingLive Asia-pacific FX news wrap 19 Aug: Like watching paint dry

If you just got to your desk for the day, don’t worry, you didn’t miss much. It was an exceptionally quiet session with very little to get excited about in terms of price action.

Catalysts were very thin. We has a plethora of politicians all weighing in on the Trump/EU meeting, but all of them basically just said what we already knew. There were some positive-looking developments when Trump had a phone call with Putin, and the overall message from both the US and the Kremlin was positive and shows ongoing engagement.

There is talk of article-5 security guarantees, but I’m sceptical on whether the US or other allies will want to commit to that given the recent history.

In FX, the NZD has been the strongest currency on the session so far, with the CAD the weakest. There were no real catalysts in play and most major pairs saw very small and contained moves.

Equity futures are technically trading in the red for most of the major benchmarks when looking at percentage change. Howeve, when looking at the actual price charts you’ll have to really squint to see the downside.

In commodities, gold was the outperformer by a whopping 0.19% so far, while oil was down close to half a percent.

Treasury yields moved up slightly.

All-in-all, a pretty boring session. Let’s hope CA CPI can shake things up a bit later in the day.

This article was written by Arno V Venter at investinglive.com.