Aussie Employment Data Misses Badly: AUD/USD

Rowan Crosby•Thursday, May 20, 2021•1 min read

Aussie employment has had a bad miss today, which some right in line with the disastrous number we saw in the US last month.

While the jobless rate did dip to 5.5%, there was a -31K job loss in the month of April. To put it in context, the expectation was for a +15K increase, which makes the number a disaster. A lot like we saw in the US when non-farm payrolls missed by the largest amount in 20 years.

Interestingly, the AUD/USD wasn’t too fazed by the result initially and is actually drifting higher on the session.

Lately, the plight of the USD has been the real driver of the AUD/USD and for that matter all the majors really.

In truth, we can see that the Aussie has been trading between 0.7700 and 0.7800 for the last month or more and hasn’t really made much progress. While the USD has been very weak over the past week and is dropping out of the bottom of the recent lows.

The only real respite for the USD, came yesterday, when markets were broadly collapsing lead by a huge sell-off in BTC and the crypto sector.

For the time being, we must assume that this range is going to hold up until proven otherwise. With that in mind, I think we can continue to buy on dips near that 0.7700 range and sell into strength. Similarly, shorting that 0.7800 on failures under that level is also a solid play.

The main story is really that the jobs situation is still a mess and even with low interest rates and plenty of stimulus, some of the fiscal policy failures at the Government level are clearly catching up.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR See More

Rowan Crosby

Asia-Pacific Analyst

Rowan Crosby is a professional futures trader from Sydney, Australia. Rowan has extensive experience trading commodities, bonds and equity futures in the Asian, European and US markets. Rowan holds a Bachelor of Finance and Economics degree and is focused heavily on Investment Finance and Quantitative Analysis.