News background & trading ideas for 19/02/2019

The day-off in the USA and Canada yesterday drove to a pretty boring American session, well, generally, Monday has not been a remarkable day in terms of price dynamics.

Although we can’t say that there were no interesting events at all, so let’s talk about the most exciting ones and the last news as well.

The meeting between representatives of the US and China became a key event of the past weekend, which resulted in the another noted by parties progress and willingness to continue the dialog up to the finish. Trump named the negotiations as very productive and promised to postpone tariff increases on Chinese goods if necessary.

Actually, precisely from this news went the main movements in the financial markets. First of all, we are talking about the growth of commodities as gold and oil, a decline of the Japanese yen, as well as the increase of commercial currencies (the Australian and Canadian dollar).
As for today, it promises to be quite calm in terms of macroeconomic statistics. Attention should be paid unless to the labor market statistics in the UK, but the formation of any directional movements after its publication should not be expected, because of Brexit.

Since yesterday did not bring anything thoroughly new to the financial markets, our trading preferences remain unchanged: sell the dollar on almost all fronts (the exception is Japanese yen - while the USDJPY pair is above 110 we are looking for points for intraday purchases). While gold is above 1294, we are looking for points for its intraday purchases as well. Last week, this tactic excellently worked out, and we see no reason to change it. We also sell the Russian ruble, which last week also made it possible to make good money.

Basically, in the light of the progress in negotiations between the United States and China and the fact that oil (WTI brand) confidently went above $55, intraday purchases of “black gold” seem to us a good trading idea in line with current market sentiments. Moreover, according to rumors, one of the largest fields of Saudi Arabia suspended its work for an indefinite period (the field produces 1.2-1.5 million b/d, so the losses are more than significant not only for the country but for the world as a whole).