Sterling gain against the Euro

Despite the large amount of ecostats released yesterday and more on the way today from both the EU and the US, there is little opportunity, other than positive Brexit negotiations, for the pound to maintain the heights it currently stands at and saw last week, particularly for any sterling gain against the euro, as there is little to no uk-centric data on the cards for the rest of this week.

Wednesday early doors and the euro rallied with better than expected figures from German and Spanish unemployment, this despite an under-par performance from the German retail sales. This caused GBP-EUR to drop by half a cent. Preliminary European inflation came in at the expected drop of 0.1%. It was the later US data that caused the tide to turn; despite mixed pending home sales, there was positive employment figures and this helped sterling gain against the euro but also, maybe surprisingly, against the dollar as well, gaining over ¾ cent against both since the early morning lows.

This gain was down to, in part, the big news of the day and the US Fed interest rate decision and policy statement. Against the backdrop of Janet Yellen’s last few days in office as the chair and her final meeting, the outcome was that the rate is to be held at the 1.5% level, although it was stated that several hikes are expected this year with “more aggressive inflation expectations”.

As today unfolds we have UK Nationwide house prices, various European and UK manufacturing PMI and currency news data from the US in the forms of jobless claims, non-farm productivity, markit and ISM manufacturing, construction spending and natural gas storage change.

With the ongoing Brexit and lack of UK data today, European and US data taking centre stage, sterling is in a vulnerable position and will be unable to easily counteract positive figures from elsewhere until next week as there is only PMI construction from the UK tomorrow, set amongst a large amount of euro and US data.