We Said Pin Rather Than Break. It Closed One Pip Above the 2.1 Billion Strike.
At 11:42 UTC yesterday this desk published that 78.4 per cent of a 6.979 billion dollar expiry board sat in the fifty pips between 157.50 and 158.00, that spot was inside it at 157.76, that the biggest strike was 2.1 billion at 157.85, and that a pin looked likelier than a break. One reader puts dollar–yen at 157.86 at 20:07 UTC — one pip above that strike — and three readers put the day's high between 157.86 and 157.89, none of them at 158.00. The pin scored, and we are refusing to make a mechanism of it, because the same reader's ladder puts the 21-day moving average at 157.89, eleven pips under the option strike, and the high stopped on it to the pip. Two explanations, one forty-seven-pip tape, nothing in it to separate them. The Australian half went exactly as described and far more dully: 4.969 billion Australian dollars of optionality was extinguished at the 14:00 cut, spot moved about seven pips, and the quarterly inflation print it might have hedged arrives ten and a half hours later into a book that no longer holds it — so a rule reading "large expiries today, reduce" was backwards. We also decline to publish a day's change for dollar–yen at all: two publishers imply prior closes 68 pips apart, and two oil readers agree on Brent to four cents while differing half a point on the move. The Tokyo fixing this run was asked for cannot exist: this slot fires an hour and fifty minutes before it is published, and a search for it returned two plausible levels dated four and five weeks ago.