Tokyo Put 19 Pips Through 160 and Took Back 53 in 19 Minutes. The Yen-Upside Hedge Got Cheaper Anyway.
Dollar-yen printed 160.19 just after three in the afternoon in Tokyo — 06:32 UTC — nineteen pips through the big figure and the furthest the pair has been above it in this episode, and nineteen minutes later it was 159.66. Fifty-three pips in nineteen minutes is 0.74 of a standard day on a surface pricing 71.4 pips, delivered inside 1.32 per cent of the day: a concentration of about fifty-six to one, and 2.79 pips a minute sustained. That is a liquidity statistic, not a volatility one, and a stop sized off a daily number cannot tell the two apart — last night's 75.0-pip move was larger in pips, smaller in pips per minute, and your risk model calls them the same session. Meanwhile the Finance Minister spoke at 00:47 UTC and the Prime Minister added four remarks between 04:49 and 04:55, the first time the head of government rather than the ministry has been in this conversation — and the one-month twenty-five delta risk reversal went from −2.0150 a week ago to −1.6700, so protection against a sharply stronger yen got 17.1 per cent cheaper in the week spot cleared 160 twice. One-week volatility rose 20.4 per cent over the same two days. Those are different objects: vol prices the size of the move, the skew prices which direction people want insuring against, and together they say the warnings have been priced as talk rather than as imminent jump risk. The 200-day finally has a third point at 158.74, undated — and extending our own dated 2.0-pip-a-day drift from Wednesday predicted 158.75, a one-pip miss, which establishes the quote is the same object without dating it. Spot sits 106.0 pips above it and the 21-day is 52.0 pips below it. Today's high is 20.0 pips under the 2 September high of 160.39, which is 0.28 of a deviation. And three of seven pairs now price one-week vol below one-month, euro-dollar having joined dollar-yen and dollar-Swiss, because the Federal Reserve meets in twenty-five days — inside a one-month option, outside a one-week one.