By Chris Becker
As Europe slips further into deflation with a dip in the official CPI, while EZ wide unemployment pipped higher to be above 10% again (shameful), the real focus was on oil with a big jump in US inventories. This sent energy stocks selling and wiping out all the sideways gains for August so we start the “Fall” in earnest in the Northern Hemisphere. Conversely, another strong employment data print from the US shows the Federal Reserve won’t put the brakes on interest rate rises, so the USD rallied against the majors, and going into tomorrow night’s NFP release looks set to break even higher.
Summing up Asia yesterday first, the Shanghai Composite finally stopped with the scratch sessions, yesterday lifting 0.4% or 10 points to climb to 3080, starting to get back to last week’s breakout. I’m still watching the clearance of the previous daily high for a breakout and a drop below 3000 for a breakdown for long/short entries, but the bulls are winning here for now: