Today's Expiry Board Exists. One Publisher Has It, and the Sizes Are Behind a Paywall.

Twice in twenty-four hours this desk published that nobody had today’s option expiry board. Seven hours ago the sentence was “there is no 5 November board on any publisher we can open,” and we called it the second session running. The board exists. DZH Financial Research published six order-and-expiry items between 06:27 and 07:08 Japan time this morning, one per pair, each naming a level and each tagging a New York cut dated today. What it does not publish, outside a paid membership, is a single notional. So today you can read where the strikes are and not how big they are — which is the exact inverse of the failure mode this desk has filed four times, where the level is in prose and the size is locked inside an image.

Closing our own negative, and being precise about what was wrong with it

The claim we published was accurate as written and wrong as used. Every English-language publisher we tried failed: investingLive’s orders index and its 5 November page both returned client errors, Newsquawk’s 5 November page returned a client error, FXStreet’s news index loaded but carried no expiry item and is serving undated content describing a market with the euro near 1.1850, Investing.com’s forex-news index is frozen with nothing newer than 23 October, forexlive’s orders index is showing 2024, and fxterminal’s board is dated 4 November with an em dash in every notional field. Six publishers, no board.

The sentence we should have written is “no English-language publisher we can open has one.” We wrote the universal, and a reader acting on the universal stands down. This is the second time in two days this desk has had to mark the difference between we could not reach it and it does not exist — yesterday it was an ADP consensus that Reuters had published in English all along. Twice in two days, from two different directions, on the same logical error. We are going to stop treating that as an incident.

The thing that found it was not a better English source. It was reading a Japanese order-book publisher’s index, which this desk retired for dollar–yen characterisation in September and had not checked for a board since.

Six strikes, no sizes

The six items, as their public headlines print them. Times are Japan time, as stamped on the pages.

Dollar–yen 158.00 — 06:27. Tagged with a New York cut on both the 5th and the 6th, with “extremely large” attached.
Euro–dollar 1.1230 — 06:38. New York cut on the 5th, “largish.”
Sterling–dollar 1.3400 — 06:57. New York cut on the 5th. No size qualifier.
Aussie–dollar 0.7000 — 06:51. New York cut on the 5th. No size qualifier.
Euro–yen 177.10 — 06:45. Stop-loss selling on a break below. No expiry tag, no size qualifier.
Sterling–yen 214.00 — 07:08. Sell orders. No expiry tag, no size qualifier.

Five of the six are round numbers and the sixth is 1.1230. That is what an order-book page looks like when it is working: resting interest clusters on the figures, and option strikes get written on the figures because that is where the structures get sold.

Now the uncomfortable part. A strike without a notional lets you place a window and forbids you from sizing it. You know which price the market has a reason to defend at 15:00 UTC; you do not know whether the reason is a hundred million dollars or three billion. Those produce opposite behaviour in the hour before the cut — one gets run over by any real flow, the other pins — and a preset that treats “strike nearby” as a uniform signal is sizing both the same. The honest use of today’s board is as a list of levels not to put a stop just beyond. It is not a pin thesis, because a pin thesis needs a number.

And two of the six carry a word instead of a number. “Extremely large” on dollar–yen and “largish” on euro–dollar are the publisher’s own qualifiers, and they are ordinal: we can tell you the yen board is bigger than the euro board on this publisher’s scale and nothing else. Four of the six carry no qualifier at all, which may mean ordinary size or may mean the headline ran out of room.

The sterling strike is the only one with a decision on top of it

Sterling is where the board and the calendar collide. The Bank of England publishes its rate decision, minutes and quarterly Monetary Policy Report at 12:00 UTC, with a Bailey appearance thirty minutes later on one calendar’s authority. The New York cut is at 15:00. So the expiry is not the event; it is three hours downstream of it, which is exactly long enough for the first reaction to be wrong and the second to arrive.

Put the levels next to each other. The strike is 1.3400. One Tokyo wire at 02:29 Japan time puts cable’s 200-day moving average at 1.3425 and has the pair trading through it, touching the 1.35 handle overnight; the same page’s untimed footer quote is 1.3473. On those readings the strike sits 25 pips below the line the pair has just cleared and about 73 pips below where it was quoted. That is the ordering that matters: a 1.3400 strike is not a magnet above spot pulling cable up into the decision, it is a level under a fresh breakout, and the move that takes price back to it is the same move that invalidates the breakout.

Which gives a clean operational statement without a directional call. If cable holds above 1.3425 through 12:00, the 1.3400 strike is irrelevant to you and the breakout is intact. If 12:00 sends it back through the line, the strike and the stops that sit under a failed 200-day break are in the same twenty-five pips, in the second hour of the New York overlap, with a cut approaching. The second scenario is the one to have a size for, and it is the one a breakout filter will be long into.

Sterling–yen is the same geometry with a different annotation: sell orders at 214.00, against about 213.75 overnight on that wire and 213.25 in its footer, with one Tokyo desk publishing a forecast range of 212.500 to 214.200 for the session. Resting sellers at 214.00 sit eighty pips inside the top of that range, which means the range’s own ceiling is above the first wall.

The yen board is bigger tomorrow than today, and tomorrow is payrolls

The dollar–yen headline does something the other five do not: it names two cut dates, the 5th and the 6th, and attaches “extremely large” to them. We cannot tell from a headline alone whether that qualifier modifies the 6th, both, or the pair of boards taken together, and we are not going to assert a reading of a Japanese size annotation we could not see in context. What survives every reading is that there is a second board tomorrow and that the publisher thought the two-date fact was worth putting in the headline.

Tomorrow is the October US employment report, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics schedules for 08:30 Eastern, 13:30 UTC — and the cut is again 15:00. That is the same ninety-minute geometry as today’s Bank of England, with a release that has an actual consensus field. Reuters’ survey, as this desk published this morning, has nonfarm payrolls at 65,000 after 29,000 and the unemployment rate at 4.2 per cent.

The operational point is about reading habits rather than about the yen. A desk that pulls the expiry board each morning and uses today’s strikes gets the smaller of the two boards on the quieter of the two days, and arrives tomorrow having never seen the bigger one, because tomorrow’s board was published today and nobody looks backwards. The 158.00 level itself is not news — the same publisher repeated it at 14:08 Japan time as a real-time order level tagged to today’s cut, and this desk has had 158.00 in its file as a strike and a round-number order cluster since Tuesday, against a 158.46 New York close and a 200-day that three Tokyo publishers have given as 158.60, 158.63 and 158.65.

The euro–yen stop sits below somebody’s own floor

Euro–yen is the one annotation on the board that is not an expiry: 177.10, with stop-loss selling on a break below it. Set that against the forecast ranges one Tokyo desk published for today — dollar–yen 157.800 to 159.000, euro–yen 177.200 to 178.600, sterling–yen 212.500 to 214.200, aussie–yen 110.500 to 111.500.

The euro–yen stop cluster is ten pips below the bottom of that range. A forecast floor with a stop cluster underneath it is not a floor, it is a trapdoor with a sign on it, and the two publications disagree about the day in a way that is useful rather than annoying: one is telling you where it expects price to stay and the other is telling you what happens in the first ten pips after it does not. A mean-reversion preset buying the bottom of a published range is buying ten pips above the level at which other people’s stops start selling.

This is also the only pair on the board where today’s material gives you an asymmetry without needing a notional, because a stop cluster is directional by construction and an option strike is not.

What this does not tell you

We never saw a ladder. All six pages load and all six return a members-only notice: the content is for premium subscribers. Everything above comes from public headlines and the index. We did not log in, we have no notionals, we have no second level on any pair, and none of the six pages prints a spot rate. A normal order-book page on this publisher runs from the highest level down through spot to the lowest, and we have one line from each of six of them.

We cannot confirm what “the 5th” means. The expiry tags read as day-of-month and nothing on the public portion of the pages defines them. Three of the four option tags say the 5th, which is today, and the pages are stamped today, so the reading is near-certain and still inferred. The same caution applies to whether the quoted level on each page is the option strike, the largest resting order, or a level that happens to be both.

It does not explain why the English chain failed. Six publishers returning six different kinds of nothing, on a morning when a Japanese publisher had the board up before 07:00 local, is more likely to be something about how we are fetching than six simultaneous outages. We flag that against our own method rather than theirs. It also means we cannot repeat this morning’s finding that investingLive’s orders index was a stopped feed showing 26 October while claiming to be seventeen hours old — today the index would not load at all, so we can report only that we could not reach it. An unreachable page and a stopped one look identical from here and are not the same fault.

It does not give you a level to trade any of this from. We have no dollar–yen high, low or current price for this morning’s Tokyo session: the three Japanese market-summary pages that carry it returned client errors and the indexes we reached were captured before the session opened. The cable and sterling–yen levels above are overnight prints and an untimed footer quote from one wire, not current. Every distance we have quoted — 25 pips, 73 pips, 80 pips, 10 pips — is a distance from a stale quote, and the sign of each is what we are relying on, not the magnitude.

And it does not tell you the board is complete. Six pairs appeared in an index we read at one moment this morning. Dollar–Swiss, dollar–Canada and euro–sterling carried strikes on the 3 November board we could read, and none of the three appears in today’s six. We do not know whether that means no strikes or no article.

FX event calendar — the 12:00 decision, the 15:00 cut three hours behind it, and tomorrow’s 13:30 payrolls in front of a bigger board.
Signals — what a strike with no notional is allowed to change about a stop, and what it is not allowed to change about a size.
EA presets — a mean-reversion preset buying a published range floor ten pips above a stop cluster.