Noticias FX

We Said 5.30% Was the Wrong Tenor. The October Ten-Year Cleared at Exactly 5.300%.

The Treasury sold $42 billion of ten-year notes at 18:00 UTC at a high yield of 5.020%, one basis point above the 5.010% when-issued level — our own subtraction, so the auction tailed and did not stop through.

Bid-to-cover 2.46, indirect bidders 61.2%, directs 29.0%, dealers 9.8%. First, a retraction: at today's pre-US slot we published a hypothesis that a calendar listing the previous ten-year auction at 5.30% had the thirty-year's yield in the ten-year's row. The 7 October ten-year cleared at exactly 5.300% on a cover of 2.77, confirmed by two readers, and the same calendar row gave the cover as 2.8. The vendor was right on both fields and we did not use the one that would have told us. With the same-tenor baseline finally in hand: the stop fell 28.0 basis points, the cover fell 0.31, and indirect bidders fell 19.1 percentage points on an offering $3 billion larger — the Treasury paid materially less and got materially worse demand, with the take rotating onshore to directs at 29.0% against a 15.9% average. Four publishers called the same numbers "in line", "a little soft" with a D plus grade, "weaker demand" and "below average demand", within six minutes of each other, and one of them has the average stop-through sitting in the tail field, which is what produced its headline. The two published averages for the cover are 2.54 over a named ten-auction window and 2.60 with no window at all, a factor of 1.75 on how light the auction looks. And dollar-yen closed above its 200-day for the fourth time since mid-September, at 158.77 against a band of 158.60 to 158.70 that still, after twelve slots, carries no date.

Dollar–Yen Did What We Said and Paid Nothing: 129 Pips, Closed Under Every 200-Day We Have.

Yesterday we published that a divided Congress was dollar-negative and would send dollar–yen back through the 200-day it had just cleared.

Democrats took both chambers, which is the same sign and more of it, and the call worked and paid nothing: the pair traded 157.38 in Tokyo to 158.67 in New York and settled at 158.46, a 129-pip range closing fourteen to nineteen pips under the line and two pips above one publisher's Ichimoku cloud top. A short held on our inference was 108 pips onside at the low, flat at the high, and up a fifth of a figure at the close. The line itself is three numbers — 158.60, 158.63 and 158.65 across three days of Tokyo publishers — so against a 158.67 high the break was two pips on the highest reading and seven on the lowest. What actually moved it was crude: settlements agree to four cents on West Texas at about $88.1 and fifteen cents on Brent at about $94.6, both down 8.3 to 8.8 per cent, while the non-settlement readings spread from $91.56 to below $87 — four clocks, not four opinions — and two headlines say 9 and 10 per cent over bodies that say 8.3 and 8.6. Implied vol fell at every tenor while the risk reversal widened. ADP printed 86,000 against four consensus readings of 67, 69 and 70 thousand, and September was revised to exactly 86,000, so the month-on-month change was zero. The final services PMI missed its own flash by 1.8 points, the second instance in three days. And we correct ourselves: we said no English page carried an ADP consensus; Reuters had published 69,000.

Dollar–Yen Gave Back 119 Pips, and No Publisher Has Today's Expiry Board.

Dollar–yen traded 157.987 to 158.764 overnight, cleared a 200-day moving average one Tokyo publisher puts at 158.63, and was back at about 157.57 by the Tokyo lunch break — roughly 119 pips given back in four hours, 106 pips below the line it had just broken. Seven hours ago this desk published that break and said it had no sourceable cause; the reversal has one, which is the opposite of the order a breakout model assumes. The yield explanation we declined to publish has now failed out of sample: the ten-year reversed an earlier decline and climbed back to about 4.945 per cent by 05:00 UTC, and the pair did not follow it. And nobody has today's expiry board — the dated Newsquawk page errored, investingLive's orders index is frozen at 26 October, nine sessions back, while claiming the item is seventeen hours old, and FXStreet carries no expiry item and serves picks describing a Thursday with the euro near 1.1850. The only readable board, yesterday's, expired at 15:00 UTC yesterday, and we refuse to dress it up as today's: an absence of data and an absence of strikes look identical to a filter and are opposite in consequence. Meanwhile the Finance Minister's disorderly-moves line, published at 23:00 UTC with the pair at its high, has flipped its sign in six hours. Two readers invert which chamber was called first. The option cut is 15:00 UTC, in the same minute as ISM Services.

Dollar–Yen Went Through the 200-Day Line Before a Single Vote Was Counted.

Dollar–yen traded 157.987 to 158.764 overnight, the strongest level since 14 October, and went through a 200-day moving average one Tokyo publisher puts near 158.60 and says has capped the pair since late September — in the hours before the first American polling station closed. The break has no sourceable cause: the same wire that gives the level says there was no dollar strength, that yen weakness drove it, and that there was no direct catalyst for the yen weakness. The tidiest explanation on offer is a yield rise on the 15:00 UTC job-openings print, and we refuse to size off it, because two readers put the ten-year near 4.91 per cent at the New York open, one page carries 4.909 against a live board at 4.9950, and nobody we could open publishes where it settled. Counting began at 23:00 UTC, the minute Tokyo opened, and one desk says a clear picture could take several days. Three morning readers describe the Senate three different ways — close, Democrats 53 to 47 if polls hold, and roughly 75 per cent on prediction markets — and the base case they publish, a divided Congress, is dollar-negative, which would send the pair back through the level it just cleared. Meanwhile the IMM net yen long above 100,000 contracts is the 101,591 figure we published yesterday, restated without refreshing a measurement now eight days old. We refuse yesterday's close: 0.5 per cent higher with a peak near 158.76 on one reading, 158.75 late with a 158.71 snapshot on another, upper 158s and up 75 sen on a third, and the four-values table that would settle it would not load.

159.00 Never Traded. The 200-Day We Said We Could Not Locate Is 158.57, and the High Was 158.603.

We pre-registered that dollar-yen would not trade 159.00 before yesterday's 14:00 UTC New York cut, with $1.1bn expiring there and nothing above it.

The claim scores: the high for the whole of 20 October was 158.603, set in the Tokyo morning, 39.7 pips short, and the pair spent the rest of the day falling to 157.82 in New York - 118 pips below the strike - inside a 78.3-pip day. The better finding is the number we said yesterday we could not give you. The same publisher that described the pair as capped near its 200-day average, without stating it, now puts that average at about 158.57. The high was 3.3 pips through it and the close about 40 pips below. And both giants on the board expired unreached: $1.1bn at 159.00 missed by 39.7 pips, EUR4.1bln at 1.1265 missed by four, with euro-dollar's New York high at 1.1261. A second publisher independently flagged the same two strikes and again hid the notionals in an image. The $686mln at 158.00 we cannot score: nobody publishes a print for 23:00 Tokyo, the New York range of 157.82 to 158.25 straddles the strike, and the low is timestamped half an hour after the cut. Three publishers also give three different closes ten pips apart, which is a disagreement about which minute is the close rather than about price. Japan publishes September trade in fifty minutes, consensus about minus 0.26 trillion yen against minus 0.84 previously, on one aggregator.

Your 200-Day Is Two Numbers 52 Pips Apart, and Tonight They Disagree

Yesterday we published a three-pip disagreement about the dollar-yen 200-day moving average.

A fourth publisher gives it as an exponential average just under 158.00 - about 52 pips below the band we were arguing about, seventeen times the whole dispute. Tonight's 158.04 close is four pips above that reading and 48 below the others, so both conventions can say the 200-day held about opposite things. One publisher moved its own figure a pip between morning and evening. The five-day average, the exponential 200-day and spot sit inside four pips - two filters that are one condition. And the full day's range was 66.0 pips, exactly what we measured five and a half hours before the auction and the minutes.

Five Publishers, Five 200-Days, 103 Pips. Spot Spent the Morning Inside All of Them.

Five publishers put dollar-yen's 200-day moving average across a 103-pip band, spot sat inside it all morning, and then a Ministry of Finance remark took the pair to 156.51 and out the bottom.