Australian Trade Balance & Building Approvals - Nice Move up to retest earlier highs

Tonight on 1st Febrary at 19:30 EST (00:30 GMT Feb 2nd) the Trade Balance figures were released out of Australia. Although the deviaiton was not that big the AUDUSD reacted very nicely. It appears this news is in focus, perhaps it indicates growth in Asia which the market is concerned about since there is a worry china might not have such a soft landing as hoped and their GDP is at 8.9% after being above 10%. Australia provides alot of raw materials to china so this one is an important forward looking indicator for china. Also released at the same time was Building Approvals, not so sure this one is so important as it did come out lower but still the AUDUSD rallied nicely for +45 pips to retest the highs set earlier during the New York Session.

Here is the figures:


Australia Trade Balance
Estimates- Median: 1200M Average: 1301M Range: 500M to 2000M
Actual: 1709M Prior: 1380M Revised: 1343M

Australia Building Approvals (MoM)
Estimates- Median: +2.0% Average: +2.1% Range: -5.0% to +10.0%
Actual: -1.0% Prior: +8.4% Revised: +10.1%

Australia Building Approvals (YoY)
Estimates- Median: -22.1% Average: -22.4% Range: -27.0% to -18.9%
Actual: -24.5% Prior: -18.9% Revised: -17.5%

Here is a 1 minute chart of the AUDUSD, the blue arrow shows the time of the release, it does appear like a bit of movement started 2-3 minutes beforehand:

Here is a 5 minute chart of the former highs from the New York session being broken by the run up caused from the news. The sell off from the highs occurred when expectations for an agreement on the Greek PSI moved from hours to days to sometime next week: