Forex Daily Analysis – January 23rd 2009

On the last day of this wild week of forex trading, the trends of the last days continue: the Japanese Yen is the strongest of currencies, beating only the dollar, which in turn makes gains against all the others.

The day began with some good news from Europe: the  Flash Manufacturing PMI and the  Flash Services PMI from both France and Germany were better than expected. Well, the expectations were quite low.

Later on today from Europe: the European  Flash Services PMI and  Flash Manufacturing PMI. EUR/USD is currently at 1.2857.

Today is yet another day for the beaten British pound: the quarterly  Prelim GDP will be published and is expected to show contraction of 1.2 for the UK’s economy. At the same time, 9:30 GMT, the monthly  Retail Sales will be published – an important figure.

The British pound is trading vey low against all currencies: GBP/USD is now at 1.3684, aiming to fall below 1.35 and break more negative records. Also GBP/JPY is extremely low – at 120.92.  Parity with the Euro isn’t near, but this pair isn’t going in favor of the pound – EUR/GBP now at 0.9395.

This was also Canada’s week, seeing a rate cut this week. Also today, there’s a major release there: the monthly CPI and Core CPI (-0.3% expected). will be released at 12:00.

With hardly any economic releases from the US this week, the greenback made gains on the wings of Obama. The optimism won a low Building Permits yesterday, and a very disappointing Unemployment Claims figure yesterday.

Happy Forex Trading!