With the multitude of headline grabbing events over recent weeks we have quietly arrived at the year’s first FED policy announcement today, and still almost nobody is talking about it. I suppose that there is a near 100% certainty that they won’t cut rates is why the meeting has slipped so far under the radar.

A frantic day in the equity market yesterday as little known Chinese AI firm DeepSeek forced a re-think on the status quo with their claims of a much cheaper alternative to ChatGPT and the other leading AI names.

We about to close out January, already one month down in the new year, but what a week it is stacking up to be. We’ve got multiple central bank announcements (including the SARB), important inflation and GDP data from the States, a slew of Big Tech earnings and no doubt there’ll be headlines from Trump!!

Finally we got some big news from Trump on the tariff front and it wasn’t what the market was expecting. He also fired his first salvo into the central bank/interest rates debate, and the combination of these comments has been great for the Rand.

Developments in the US are ensuring that the Dollar’s dominance is firmly in place but the Rand usually finds support when we get good news out of China and hopefully that remains the case after Chinese GDP data beat expectations earlier this morning, although there’s no sign of an encouraging pull through to our exchange rate just yet.