The Daily Forex Market Report

Good morning

 

Not wanting to waste a marketing opportunity Canadian beer maker, Moosehead Breweries, is selling a “Presidential Pack” which is 1 461 cans of bear weighing 862 kilograms, one for each day of Trump’s 4-year presidency.  The strapline is catchy:  “We can’t predict how the next four years will go, but considering how 2025 started, we have a feeling this many beers will come in handy.”

 

These are the mid rates at 5:50 today:

 

USD = R18.26	AUD = R11.53
GBP = R23.64	DXY = 104.29
EUR = R19.72	Brent Crude = $73.22 per barrel

 

Market News

 

• A beer or two might help make watching movements in the Rand more entertaining as our recent sideways drift is getting fairly boring.  We strengthened to R18.14 to the Dollar on the 6^th of March but have been very range bound since, and yesterday continued that trend as we opened at R18.27, strengthened to R18.15 before weakening to R18.25 by the close.
• Today’s report will be short and sweet as almost nothing happened in the currency market yesterday while there is also very little on the immediate horizon, this as the market is killing time ahead of the US inflation report on Friday afternoon but is actually waiting for Trump’s next round of tariffs on the 2^nd of April.  The Dollar Index suffered a small dip from 104.45 to 103.96 yesterday, a dip that allowed us to touch R18.15 for a while, but with the index climbing back up to 104.28 soon after that reversed our earlier gains and we closed at R18.25.
• The Dollar Index first fell yesterday but then bounced back up with the drivers of this price action probably being a US consumer confidence report, Dollar negative, which was followed by FED speak which would typically be Dollar positive.  On the consumer side a report confirmed that confidence levels have fallen to a 4-year low, but more importantly, a reading of where consumers see the prospects of their future economic conditions has fallen to a 12 year low.  We’ve seen in recent weeks how concerns about the US economy have hurt the Dollar and yesterday that trend continued. 
• On the FED side of things we had Raphael Bostic saying two days ago that he feels the FED need only cut interest rates once this year rather than the two that were pencilled in at last week’s policy announcement, and then yesterday Adriana Kugler said that while their current policy remains at a restrictive level she sees progress slowing on their task of bringing inflation down to 2%.  Any FED comments that cast doubt on the two rate cuts priced into the market for 2025 will be Dollar positive and the index moved back up after an earlier dip. 
• Yesterday’s moves were muted as the market waits for Trump’s tariff announcements next Wednesday and the risk for the Rand is that the market is taking recent Trump comments as actual concessions.  Whether certain countries, industries of even companies will be exempt from his widespread tariff plans remains to be seen but for now the resultant risk-on feel has seen equities recover some of their lost ground while the Rand remains well bid as a risk asset. 
• No local market data today.
• Possible USD mid rate trading ranges in the Rand today are R18.15 and R18.45.

 

 

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