Noticias FX

157.55 Was the Floor. The Low Is 157.53, and Day Fourteen Under a Yen Survives.

Dollar-yen traded through its floor in the Tokyo session and the compression survived anyway.

One publisher named support at 157.55 and a forecast range of 157.500 to 158.600 at 22:39 UTC yesterday; the session low printed 157.53, two pips through the support and three above the band's bottom, and the 157.80 print at 03:15 UTC took out Tuesday's 157.83 and Wednesday's 157.84 in one move. Yet 157.53 to 158.25 is only 72.0 pips, so this is day fourteen of sub-one-yen trading on that publisher's count. We cannot second-source the count, but we have independently measured the last three days at 78.3, 55.0 and 72.0 pips from other publishers, which corroborates the mechanism over three sessions without confirming a fourteen-day length. The structural reason the upside stalls: with spot at 157.92 there were four levels inside 64 pips above it - the 21-day at 158.02, the 10-day at 158.23, the Ichimoku conversion at 158.25 and the 200-day at 158.56 - in a market averaging 68 pips a day. And the 200-day itself cannot be stated to better than a 4-pip band: 158.56, 158.57 and about 158.60, with one publisher disagreeing with itself a day apart. The driver is a Tesla capital expenditure cut and a Gulf tanker report, not Japan, which makes a yen position this morning an equity-volatility position wearing a currency ticker. One source gives a session low 23 pips away from its own range field and we say so rather than resolving it.

The 64-Pip Gap Closed Before the Instrument Meant to Price It Opened. It Was Also 80 Pips.

Seven hours ago we published a 64.4-pip weekend gap in euro-yen and said the instrument that prices its cause could not trade yet.

Both halves are now marked to market and in opposite directions. At the 05:15 snapshot euro-yen implies 177.5238 against Friday's 177.4951 - 2.9 pips above the close it gapped away from, a 67.2-pip retrace or 104.5 per cent of the gap - while the French-German spread still has no 19 October value and will not until bonds open at 07:00. Two corrections. The Monday low was 1.1181 in euro-dollar, ten pips below the indicative open we used, which puts the true gap at 80.2 pips rather than 64.4: an indicative print is not the worst fill. And the recovery decomposes 91.7 per cent euro, 8.3 per cent yen, with the yen leg pushing plus 6.7 yen-pips into the fall and plus 5.6 into the rally - the same direction twice, through a 150-pip round trip in which dollar-yen never left a 35-pip band. Also: a publisher prices the same weekend at 492 pips in euro-Canada, where cross arithmetic says 63.6, because its 1.6269 anchor implies a euro-dollar 274 pips above Friday's close. Euro net short 137,573 contracts with 38,241 added in the week to 13 October. And the arrest count we printed has a rival at 1,800 against 2,400, with the injury figure out by a factor of two.

Three Positioning Numbers Before the 12:30 Block, All Broken Differently

Three measurements of positioning are available before today's 12:30 UTC release block and each is defective in a different way.

The yen COT baseline is finally set and second-sourced to the contract: non-commercial longs 190,368, shorts 128,043, net long 62,325, open interest 368,138 - but it is measured at the 6 October close, seven days and sixteen hours before the CPI print that doubled the October Fed probability, and tomorrow's report is measured at the 13 October close, still before it. The first snapshot containing the reaction publishes on 23 October. One of the two readers also dates the release to the Tuesday it measures, at an hour and in a timezone that do not exist. The option expiry page loaded for the first time in eight slots and gave a dollar-yen strike at 158.00 five pips from spot, but the notionals are inside an image. And a retail positioning snapshot shows cross-yen shorts cut by 33.9, 17.9 and 16.3 against 1.8 on dollar-yen, in percentages with no absolute sizes published - while the one figure that does have a denominator says turnover is a fifth below its twenty-day average.

The Yen Positioning Spread Grew 59,862 Contracts Over a Closed Weekend. We Read One More Row.

We published a 92,838-contract yen positioning spread on Friday.

It is now 152,700 - and nothing traded, because the futures market was shut all weekend. The difference is one more row: dealers, net short 84,905 contracts on the same Tuesday, on the same page as the two figures we used. Four values for one market on one day, 1.909 trillion yen apart, and the two reporting breakdowns do not sum - adding a true figure moved the discrepancy from 19,573 contracts to 104,478. Plus why the dealer row is mostly the mirror of the asset-manager row, and why three runs of looking have still not found a second reader.

The 30-Year Tailed by a Tenth of a Basis Point. The Average It Was Scored Against Is the Last Six Auctions.

Yesterday's 22-billion-dollar thirty-year reopening cleared at 5.618 per cent, one tenth of a basis point above the when-issued - a genuine tail, and the same publisher that mislabelled September's stop-through has the word right this time. Dealers took 6.79 per cent against a stated average of 10.3, which the same publisher gave as 11.5 a month ago. We reconstructed that average: it is a six-auction rolling window, and it reconciles on four fields across two windows, four of them exactly. September's 2.2 per cent dealer take is now inside the benchmark it set the bar for. Overnight the pair ran 158.37 to 157.52, two pips through a published twenty-day exponential average, on an Iran headline rather than on supply.

One Tuesday, Four Yen Positions, 72,249 Contracts Apart

We carried a yen net long of 55,440 contracts for nine days as though it were the position.

Two readers of the same report for the same Tuesday put leveraged funds net short 14,161 and net short 16,809; one of them puts asset managers net long 51,961 in the same sentence. Four numbers, one Tuesday, 72,249 contracts apart - about 903 billion yen, or 5.7 billion dollars at this morning's 158.18 - and ours is the only one with no category written next to it. The two readers agree to 303 contracts on how much the position moved and disagree by 2,648 on where it is.

Our 55,400 Is Right. At the Agency It Is Two Desks Facing Opposite Ways.

Five runs of quoting a 55,400 net long, and at the agency itself it is 55,440 — non-commercial longs of 176,266 against 120,826 short, with the prior week's 71,982 matching the vendor's 72.0 thousand.

But the same release cuts the identical 360,720 of open interest a second way, and asset managers are net long 51,634 while leveraged funds are net short 14,161. Last week they moved in opposite directions, and the leveraged-funds change alone was 1.30 times the headline move. The net fall was 96.8 per cent long liquidation: 16,008 longs closed against 534 shorts opened. And it was measured on 29 September, three days before the payrolls print.

Four Surprises Moved Nothing. A $69 Billion Auction Cleared 47 Basis Points Higher.

The CBI beat by 24 points and sterling made a new September low.

Australia's manufacturing PMI fell into contraction at 49.3 and AUD/USD sat at 0.7115. Iran offered to reopen Hormuz and the yen round-tripped fifty pips. The only directional information all session came from a $69bn two-year auction that scored in line on every demand metric — and cleared 47.2 basis points above July's.

Tokyo Hands London 46 Pips and a CPI Beat That Was All Diesel

Six hours of Tokyo produced forty-six pips in USD/JPY and thirteen in EUR/USD.

UK CPI beat to 3.1% and every basis point of it was motor fuel — core held at 2.6%, so the print tells you not to trade it. The only order book we can read is EUR/JPY: stops at 179.50, sells and stops together at 180.00, and nothing real bid until 177.70. No expiry ladder for today at 06:26, the fifth time we have counted. With the Fed under twelve hours out, London is a sizing question, not a direction one.