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British Pound Outlook July 27-31 2009

The British Pound hardly moved during the last week. This week’s economic indicators will move the Pound, but probably won’t move it out of its range. Here’s an outlook for this week’s key events and a technical analysis for GBP/USD.

Last week provided two surprises in British news: on one hand, Retail Sales surged by 1.2%, 3 times better than 0.4% that was expected. On the other hand, the all-important GDP release was a big disappointment. Despite these major surprises, GBP/USD didn’t budge from the narrow range we got used to.

Here are this week’s important releases:

  1. CBI Realized Sales: The first British figure for this week is published on Tuesday at 10:00 GMT. This leading indicator of British consumer spending is expected to stay negative, which means a lower sales volume. After scoring -17 for two months in a row, it’s expected to rise to -12.
  2. Net Lending to Individuals:  The debt level in the UK is predicted to rise from 0.6 billion to 0.9 billion, indicating that lenders feel better with giving away their money, and that consumers are ready to borrow. Last month, this figured fell short of expectations. The fresh figure will be released on Wednesday at 8:30 GMT.
  3. Nationwide HPI: As always, the British real estate sector still is one of the key factors in the economy. After house prices tumbled down, they are expected to rise modestly, this time by 0.3%. The figure will be published on Thursday at 6:00 GMT. Despite not being the earliest report, this wide survey is more reliable.
  4. GfK Consumer Confidence: British consumers are still quite pessimistic, and are expected to stay so. The figure has improved slowly in the past months, and has moved to up -25 from the bottom of -39. This time it’s predicted to take another small step forward, to -23. This figure is published on Thursday at 23:00 GMT (midnight in Britain). For the GBP/USD pair, it’ll serve as a prelude to the American GDP, published during Friday.

These are the main events for the Pound, in a rather “slow” week in economic indicators. GBP/USD will naturally move by American figures as well, with the aforementioned GDP and Durable Goods Orders being the most interesting releases in America.

GBP/USD Technical Analysis

Range trading continued to dominate the popular GBP/USD pair. During last week, cable traded between 1.6310 to 1.6584, sticking to the narrow range that we already got used to in the last two months.

This week, it didn’t test the far ends of this range,  1.60-1.6660. The level of 1.62 continues to be a minor resistance line. Since the technical analysis didn’t change dramatically, I’ll point you to the last week’s British Pound outlook.

Like the Euro and other currencies, the big question is: when will this all explode?

When will the dollar get a new direction? Will the greenback go up or down? The “explosion” probably won’t happen this week though…

Further reading:

Yohay Elam

Yohay Elam

Yohay Elam: Founder, Writer and Editor I have been into forex trading for over 5 years, and I share the experience that I have and the knowledge that I've accumulated. After taking a short course about forex. Like many forex traders, I've earned a significant share of my knowledge the hard way. Macroeconomics, the impact of news on the ever-moving currency markets and trading psychology have always fascinated me. Before founding Forex Crunch, I've worked as a programmer in various hi-tech companies. I have a B. Sc. in Computer Science from Ben Gurion University. Given this background, forex software has a relatively bigger share in the posts.