A sea of red across Asian stocks markets today in reaction to overnight caution on Wall Street with the latest unemployment print locally causing the ASX200 to slip while Japanese markets have given up almost all of their recent gains as Yen strengthened on the risk off move.
The Shanghai Composite is set to close lower as confidence evaporates, currently down 0.2% to 3252 points, while the Hang Seng Index is back below the 30,000 point level, losing 0.5% to be at 29952 and looking weak here, failing to burst through firming resistance at the recent daily highs:
US and Eurostoxx futures are down sharply, with the four hourly chart of the S&P 500 showing a significant retracement and break below recent resistance that had been support for most of this week at the 2900 points level with trailing ATR support also taken out:
Japanese stock markets have retraced even further due to a much stronger Yen with the Nikkei 225 losing nearly 1% to finish at 22090 points. The USDJPY pair broke below its own low moving average on the four hourly chart, getting out of what has been a very tight trading range:
Australian stocks are still doing poorly with the ASX200 closing 0.1% lower to 6249 points in reaction to the higher than expected unemployment print. This also took the sails out of the Australian dollar with a pullback below the 72 handle but still being respected on the uptrend:
The economic calendar continues tonight with three releases of note, first its the BOE’s credit report, then preliminary PMI prints for Europe followed by US advance retail sales for March.