PMI in Europe, unemployed in the USA and trade wars 2.0

22 Mei 2020

Yesterday in the news plan was relatively calm. Everyone was already habitually waiting for the next millions of unemployed from the United States. And the States did not disappoint - another 2.4 million joined the 36 million army of unemployed. In general, one can only guess when the US stock market will at least try to take into account these and other negative data in its prices.

The situation with the UK PMI indices turned out to be somewhat better. In particular, the PMI index of business activity in the manufacturing sector in May amounted to 40.6 points against the forecast of 37.2, but in the services sector (more importantly), the PMI business activity index reached 27.8, which is somewhat better than the forecast of 24.0 points, but in general extremely weak. In addition, data on CBI Trends (balance of orders) came out in a deeply negative zone (-62 with a forecast of -50). So sales of the pound remain for us the top trading idea for the foreign exchange market this week. Especially when you consider that today will be published data on retail sales in the UK for April, which definitely will be devastating.

In the Eurozone, the Composite PMI Index turned out to be rather weak (30.5 with a forecast of 27.0), as well as in the context of individual countries (Germany, France), which did not prevent the euro from pairing with the dollar once again trying to take important resistance of 1.10. Such attempts we recommend to use for sales EURUSD.

The US continues to blame China for all mortal sins, and this time the States were as transparent as possible in their statements, indicating that "everything is coming from the top" (meaning President Xi Jin Ping). So the markets are becoming increasingly stronger in the thought that the first phase of trade deal may be the last successful negotiation between US and China. However, she is a big question. So the trade wars version 2.0 seem to be inevitable. Which again, does not add any optimism. As well as overcoming the mark of 5 million coronavirus cases in the world.