The 22 September expiry board went up at 05:38 UTC, an hour and twenty minutes before the London open, and it is unusually legible. USD/JPY carries large strikes at 157.00 and 158.00 with spot between them at 157.52–157.55. EUR/USD carries 1.1500 with spot at 1.1475. One of those is a bracket. The other is a target with three separate obstacles stacked in the twenty-five pips beneath it. Neither comes with a number attached, because the notionals are in an image again.
The yen strikes are almost exactly equidistant, and that is the whole point
Two readers put USD/JPY in a four-pip band this morning: Trading Economics has 157.517, up 0.1595 on the day, and FXStreet has it “around 157.55” in early Tuesday trade. Take the band at face value and the arithmetic is flat. Spot is 52 to 55 pips above the 157.00 strike and 45 to 48 pips below the 158.00 strike. On the higher reading it is nearer the top; on the lower reading it is nearer the middle. Either way you are inside ten pips of the centre of a hundred-pip box.
InvestingLive calls them “large expiries sandwiching the current spot price” that “may act as bookends for price action in the session ahead.” That is the right description and it is worth being precise about what it implies for you. A strike above and a strike below, roughly equidistant, with no directional skew between them, is not a magnet in either direction. It is a pair of soft edges. The trade it argues against is a breakout entry sized as though the first fifty pips were free.
The context makes the edges softer rather than harder. Japan is closed for the second of three holidays, so the domestic bid and offer that normally sit around a figure are not there. The yen has now weakened for a third consecutive session, and the Bank of Japan ran a rate check with market participants late Friday. InvestingLive flags “thinner liquidity conditions involving the yen currency” and intervention risk in the same breath as the strikes, which is the correct pairing: an expiry defends a level by attracting hedging flow, and hedging flow is exactly what a holiday takes away.
The euro strike is twenty-five pips away and three separate things sit in the gap
EUR/USD is the more interesting half of the board. InvestingLive puts the 1.1500 strike “less than 30 pips higher away from the current spot price” and notes that the 100-hour moving average rests around 1.1485, which “may limit upside extensions.” FXStreet had spot at 1.1475 at 05:05 UTC. So the gap is twenty-five pips, and the 100-hour average is sitting in the middle of it.
UOB, writing this morning off a 1.1464 close, adds two more. Its twenty-four-hour resistance levels are 1.1480 and 1.1495. Both are below the strike. Its medium-term view is that EUR/USD “could continue to decline to 1.1435, with potential extension to 1.1400,” and it names 1.1520 as the level whose breach would signal the decline from early last week is stabilising — twenty pips above the strike.
Stack them and the picture is this: to reach the 1.1500 expiry, spot has to go through a moving average at 1.1485 and two named resistance levels at 1.1480 and 1.1495, all inside twenty-five pips. Three obstacles per twenty-five pips is dense. It does not make 1.1500 unreachable — London routinely covers twenty-five pips in the first hour — but it does mean the strike is not the nearest thing in front of price, and a system that treats the expiry as the next level is skipping the three that come first.
One honest complication, and we are publishing it rather than smoothing it. FXStreet’s own EUR/USD forecast this morning names 1.1545, the 100-day simple moving average, as initial resistance, with initial support at 1.1445. On that reading there is nothing between spot and 1.1500 at all. The two are not in conflict — a 100-hour average and a 100-day average are different instruments answering different questions — but they are in conflict about which one your alert should fire on, and only one of them can be the line you actually trade.
The notionals are in an image, again
The board’s table is published as a picture. It does not extract, the syndication mirrors do not carry it either, and the commentary text names strikes without naming sizes. So what we can tell you is where the expiries are and that InvestingLive describes the yen pair as “large.” We cannot tell you whether that is $400 million or $2 billion, and we are not going to guess.
This is a standing limitation on this source and it is worth stating plainly what it does to the board’s usefulness. A strike without a notional tells you a level is watched. It does not tell you whether the hedging flow is big enough to pin anything. Those are different claims and only the first is available to you today. If your rule is “fade into a large expiry,” the input that defines “large” is the one you do not have, and the honest response is to size the trade as though the strike were medium rather than to assume the adjective.
What a bracketed pair is worth in the first London hour
The operational content is narrower than the board looks. For USD/JPY: spot is near the middle of a hundred-pip box with soft edges and a holiday underneath it, so range assumptions are more defensible than trend assumptions until one edge is tested with real volume behind it. For EUR/USD: the strike is not the first thing in the way, and three levels inside twenty-five pips is the reason a breakout stop placed just above the strike is sitting behind a lot of other people’s stops.
Both expire at the 10:00 New York cut, which is 14:00 UTC. That is seven and three-quarter hours from the London open and the same minute as two scheduled prints. The hedging flow that matters for these strikes is therefore not a London-morning phenomenon at all — it is an afternoon one, arriving in a minute that is already crowded. Trading the expiry in the first London hour is trading an anticipation of it, not the thing itself.
What this does not tell you
It does not tell you the sizes. That is the single largest gap in this piece and everything about “large” rests on one publisher’s adjective.
It does not tell you the full board. The commentary names three strikes across two pairs; the table carries more, and we cannot read it.
The 100-hour moving average at 1.1485 and the 1.1480 and 1.1495 resistance levels are each single-sourced — InvestingLive for the first, UOB via FXStreet for the other two. They agree with each other in the sense of clustering in the same twenty-five pips, which is suggestive but is not independent confirmation of any one of them.
And it does not tell you which way any of this resolves. A strike is a place where someone has a hedging interest, not a forecast. Japan being shut cuts both ways: thin markets pin less and they also break further.
Related
- FX events calendar — the 14:00 UTC cut and what lands in the same minute
- Signals
- EA presets — range-versus-breakout assumptions on a holiday session
