As has been the case in recent times, the week ahead will be fully focused on the central banks.

The main interest will be once again in the US as we get the minutes from the October meeting of the Fed. Of course, at that meeting, the members indicated that they would be stopping their easing for the time being. That change came after three rate cuts.

Last week, we heard from Fed boss Jerome Powell when he testified in front of Congress and he reiterated that point. So there is going to be plenty of attention as to what the FOMC will do next and hopefully, the minutes will give us more clarity.

At the same time, we also get the ECB minutes, which is interesting as it was the last with Mario Draghi at the helm. Christine Lagarde also speaks on Friday, so it should be an interesting week to see the changing guard taking place in Europe so watch the EUR/USD closely.

Today the calendar is thin to start the trading week with some minor ECB news to get things moving. There is still plenty of US politics and the US-China news hanging over markets so that might be a theme to look for early in the US session.

Forex Signal Update

The FX Leaders Team finished with 8 wins from 13 signals for a solid week and a 62% win rate.

USD/JPY – Active Signal

The USD/JPY has been holding under 109.00 which is proving to be strong resistance at the moment. As such, we are short looking for a little bit of downside here.

AUD/USD – Active Signal

The AUD/USD has been very soft in the last week or so after some weak fundamentals have increased the odds of a rate cut in February. We are short here looking to ride that trend

Cryptocurrency Update

BTC is continuing to break down here and is getting star stepped down, which is very clear on the charts.

The $8,500 level has fallen now, so that opens the door to that move all the way down to $8,000.

As we can see on the chart here, that downtrend line is quite strong. So we can really use that to our advantage. Either as a good stop loss area on a short, or even as an area for a quick long on the break as it might lead to a little upside pop on the back of some covering.

Either way, the bias is still clearly to the downside and I would only be looking for scalps to the long side on momentum breaks.