Asian Session Forex Recap – July 6, 2016

• RBA on a wait-and-see mode before inflation reports
• NZ’s NZIER business confidence jumps from 2 to 19 in Q2 2016
• AU AIG services index slips from 51.5 to 51.3
• NZ ANZ commodity prices up by 3.7% vs. 1.1% previous
• AU retail sales rises by 0.2% in May vs. 0.3% expected, 0.1% previous
• AU trade deficit widens from 1.79B AUD to 2.22B AUD in May
• China’s Caixin services PMI rises from 51.2 to 52.7 vs. June

Risk appetite took a turn during the Asian forex trading session despite the release of relatively better-than-expected economic reports. What’s up with that?!

Major Market Movers:

Australia’s weak data and overall risk aversion dragged it back down to its pre-RBA levels. AUD/USD hit a high of .7545 but is now trading at the .7500 levels. AUD/JPY also shot up to 77.05 before going back down to 76.57 while EUR/AUD recovered from 1.4755 to trade back above the 1.4800 levels.
USD and JPY – The return to the risk aversion theme pushed low-yielding currencies like the dollar and yen higher across the board.
EUR/USD is down by 31 pips (-0.28%), GBP/USD is down by 48 pips (-0.36%) while USD/JPY is down by 47 pips (-0.46%), EUR/JPY is down by 88 pips (-0.77%), and GBP/JPY is down by a whopping 114 pips (-0.84%)