The danger of working in the markets is complacency. Those of us at the coalface trying to analyse and advise accordingly on the disparate moves of currencies occasionally look at a day’s movements on the exchanges and just shrug. Sometimes the market really is a feckless beast.

The incident that has caused this considerable ire was Friday’s Non-Farm Payrolls release. The reading showed 264,000 jobs were lost in the month of September; much worse than the 175,000 that were expected. This should have led to a massive sell off in global equities, heightened risk aversion and a stronger dollar. Yet none of this happened with GBPUSD nearly fighting back to the 1.60 level.

The G7 meeting over the weekend was fairly quiet; the ‘Group of 7’ is now less important than the G20 given the global nature of the problems that face us and, apart from continued conversation on the strength of the Chinese Yuan, currency was on the back burner.

We start as we mean to go on this week data wise with a lot of tier 1 numbers. EU retail sales alongside services PMI should allow the euro to strengthen whilst we hope that the UK services PMI release due at 09.30 can similarly help the pound.     

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