On Tuesday, the 23rd of June at 10:00 AM ET
4 USD reports were released, 2 reports were dealing with “Existing Home Sales”, by the National Association of Realtors, one with the “House Price Index” by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and another dealt with the ”Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index” by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond .
Probably the most important releases were the 2 “Existing Home Sales”, mostly the volume “Existing Home Sales”, which is released monthly about 25 days after the months end.
The forecast for the volume “Existing Home Sales” was 4.82M homes, an increase over the previous sales of 4.68M homes.
I was video monitoring the currency pair EUR/USD and set up to trade that currency pair if the report was surprising enough to cause the market to move in a favorable way to trade. If so, I would attempt a fast in, fast out “scalp” trade.
Here is what happened:
This is a 1 minute chart of the currency pair EUR/USD
The volume USD Existing Home Sales were such prior to the report:
Forecast= 4.82M Previous= 4.68M
The report was released about 8 seconds after 10:00 AM ET and was at 4.77M, lower than forecast, but still an improvement over the actual report from last month.
About 2 minutes and 8 seconds after 10:00 AM ET the revision of last months actual report was released, it was 4.66M – just a little bit lower.
In less than a minute after the revision, the market was bailing out of the USD and buying the EURO.
The market moved up about 29 PIPS in 3 minutes before reversing (profit taking?)
Over all, there was not enough of a difference between the “forecast” and the “actual” report to cause any great opportunity for a good “scalp”.
But has you can see in the chart, the market felt that the small improvement in sales were enough to make the USD stronger and started buying the USD 6 minutes after the report.
My broker spread jumped up 10 PIPS about a minute prior to the report release, but went back down about 30 seconds into the report. My guess is that the broker has software set up to monitor the possibility of the news release being a surprise – either the report itself, or, the number of traders entering the market, or, the amount of money traded.
Perhaps one of you visitors can enlighten me.
Anyway, there was not enough going on with this report this month, but stay tuned for next month.
The next reporting of the USD Existing Home Sales will be on the 23rd of July
