News Driven Market; Cryptowatch
Mati Greenspan | Apr 24, 2017 04:47AM ET
The two frontrunners in the French election will now go head to head in a winner takes all presidential race. At the moment, Emmanuel macron is the favorite to win on May 7th and the market is breathing a much needed sigh of relief.
However, populist Marine Le Pen currently has a 40% chance of winning the presidency and that's certainly a cause for concern.
Today's Highlights
Mind the Gaps
News Driven Market
CryptoWatch
Please note: All data, figures and graphs are valid as of April 24th. All trading carries risk. Only risk capital you're prepared to lose.
Market Overview
As we wrote in Friday's email, the markets were closed at the time that the winners were announced, which led to some quite significant gaps in the market.
Most noticeable is the EUR/USD, which is gapped from about 1.07 to above 1.09.
The USD/JPY also gapped up about 100 pips...
The Bank of Japan is determined to continue with their QE program until reaching the 2% inflation target, which is currently nowhere in sight. So in the meantime, it's only geopolitical risks that have been keeping this pair down.
The biggest loser was the world's number one safe haven, gold.
Gold opened the week with a gap down of about $10 an ounce. A pretty tame move, all things considered.
European stock markets are opening very strong at the moment, some of them up more than 3% and the United States markets are largely expected to fly. There's nothing like an averted disaster to push overvalued markets over the moon.
What's next?
Now we have 2 weeks to see what the odds of a Le Pen victory really are. Though polls in France are traditionally very accurate, no doubt many analysts will point out that Donald Trump's odds of winning the US election on the day of the vote were less than 30%.
Get The News You Want
The UK elections might get increasingly important. At the moment, it seems like Theresa May will be looking for a slam dunk victory. However, if there are any challenges that will emerge, they will need to do so quickly.
Over in the United States, the Trump administration is struggling to avoid a government shutdown, repealing Obamacare, and implementing tax reforms.
All of which seem like temporary problems if we can just get through June 9th without any major surprises, things should go back to normal.
Cryptos Rising
The value of the bitcoin blockchain and other digital currencies is rising fast. Despite the scalability issues, bitcoin remains near the top of its range.
Over the weekend, there was a large meeting of Chinese cryptocurrency experts, who got together and decided to implement the segwit solution for the Litecoin network. This sent the price of Litecoin up several dollars. If implemented, the move could be good for all cryptocurrencies. If Litecoin can do it, there's certainly hope for bitcoin to implement such a solution as well.
Ethereum tokens are above $50 once again. There is currently a resistance at $51 but if it passes that, we could be looking at a new all time high before not too long.
Let's have an awesome day ahead.
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