The main fundamental news out today will be the advance GDP figures for the US, due for release at 1.30 this afternoon ( UK time), which measures the annualized change in the value of all goods and services produced by the US economy. Whilst the data is produced quarterly it is actually reported in an annual format, and to confuse matters further, ( well this is economic data!!) there are actually three versions released which all cover much the same thing, but a month apart. The first is the advance, then the preliminary and finally ( guess what) the final. The advance is of course the first ( and earliest) and tends to have the most impact, as later reports simply confirm the picture. In simple terms if the actual is better than the forecast then this will be good for the home currency, the US dollar. The forecast for this afternoon is -5.4% against a previous of -0.5%. According to Bloomberg news this morning : ” The U.S. economy probably nosedived in the final months of last year, a trajectory that’s likely to continue in early 2009 as soaring unemployment wallops consumer spending, economists said before a government report today. Gross domestic product contracted at a 5.5 percent annual pace from October through December, according to the median estimate of 79 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. It would be the biggest drop since 1982 and follows a 0.5 percent decline the previous three months.”
As I said earlier, this is a significant release, and likley to be bad, but the question ofcourse for us as traders is, has the market factored in an appalling set of figures already – indeed we saw this happen in Japan last night, with very little reaction to some awful fundamental economic data for the Japanese yen. If you are going to trade the news, as always I suggest you wait for the first five to ten minutes, let the markets settle, and then take an opposite position to the market direction, with a wide stop in place. If you would like to view the euro vds dollar from a technical point of view, please just follow the link here. Good luck today, and have a great weekend.
