Monday, January 23, 2012

Israel Cuts Rates - The shekel weakens against the Greenback -> Hint of RBA's cut on February 6th?

On January 23rd at 10:30 EST (15:30 GMT) the Bank of Israel cut their interest rates by 25 basis points. The USDILS forex currency pair spiked higher, but not that much after the spread, however it did continue to move up - with Israeli Shekel weakness - thru the day, making a more substantial move. Basically out of 23 analysts surveyed 13 expected the Central Bank to hold rates steady at 2.75% however 10 analysts expected a 0.25% or 25 bps cut to 2.5%. So really whatever happened the Shekel would have moved.

First here is the 1 minute USDILS chart which show the spike:

and here is the 3 minute chart of USDILS which shows more of the continuation of the move after the initial spike:

However the US Dollar has been weakening against most pairs since basically the better Chinese Figures on January 17th, or the Spainish and Italian Bond auctions on January 12th however Friday January 13th was the S&P downgrade of France which was a risk-off day...as always a bit of whipping around near a reversal point. Anyhow not to get sidetracked, the point is that the EURILS was a better pair to play as the Euro gets a bit of retracement finally from weeks/months of selling pressure...no more sellers left perhaps? So here is the 1 minute chart of the EURILS:

and here is the 5 minute chart of EURILS which shows more of the follow thru:

Also finally the 5 minute chart again, this time rewinded to the start of the week, so the trend heading into the news can be noticed:

Another chart to share here is a comparison of Interest Rate moves by the Bank of Israel and the Royal Bank of Australia. RBA rate decision is on February 6th and most analysts expect a cut.

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