Personally, I would be a USD/JPY bull at this point. But often things are not that straightforward in forex. Sometimes all the fundamental indicators are not enough to turn the tide around. In the case of USD/JPY the fundamental and technical indicators align together, but even then the forex market decides to go its own way.
As I said, I would be a USD/JPY bull, but I haven´t opened a long term buy forex signal yet because there is a case for both trades, long and short, since there are pros and cons for bulls in this forex pair right now. Let´s have a look at them.
Pros:
1 – The Japanese economy is showing any signs of life
2 – Only last Thursday the economic data showed that Japan is in deflation
3 – The BOJ (Bank of Japan) is increasing the monetary stimulus programme
4 – The Japanese government is joining the BOJ with a fiscal programme
5 – Last Friday Yellen said that the case for an interest rate hike is stronger now
6 – Technically this forex pair is oversold in all time frame forex charts
7 – The 100 support level has held so far
Cons:
1 – The market sentiment has been bearish during all this year
2 – Meaning full support levels such as 1.20, 1.16 1.111 and 1.05 have been broken, so why can we trust the 100 level?
3 – Yellen´s comment doesn´t mean the FED will hike the interest rates in September
4 – Although London is off today, the follow through of Friday´s 200 pip surge has been very minimal
5 – The stock and bond markets are sending us some mixed signals with stocks and bonds higher so far today
6 – technically this forex pair is not out of the woods unless the 50 and 100 moving averages are broken.
The downtrend is still intact and this might just be another retrace before the next leg down
You would say that 7-6 is a win for the bulls. But we know that 2+2 don´t always make 4 in forex. Sometimes only one reason is enough to push the price down even if there are 10 reasons which point up. So, right now we can say it´s a draw. We will only open a long term buy forex signal if we see that the case for a long trade has strengthened, as Yellen would say.