- Tuesday's session on Asian markets saw relatively small declines in most stock indexes. Weaker sentiment is seen primarily in China, where the CH50Cash lost nearly 0.65%.
- The not-so-optimistic mood in this region of the world means that contracts based on European and U.S. indices are now also under slight downward pressure. The DE40 contract is now losing 0.11%, while the US100 is down 0.3%.
- The major currency pairs are trading with little deviation at the start of today's session. Trump is pushing through tariffs on steel and aluminum, and this has remained a key theme in the market over the past two days. The new 25% tariffs cancel all existing agreements and will go into effect on March 12. However, the market assumes that there is a possibility of some concessions in negotiations between the countries by then, so the forex market's reaction to the news was relatively quiet.
- The Australian dollar, however, was a certain exception to this. Australian Prime Minister Albanese said that Trump was considering exempting Australia from tariff changes with respect to steel, but the market a few minutes later was heavily surprised by Trump's words, which stated that there would be no exceptions in these decisions. For this reason, AUD is seeing a bit more volatility today.
- Gold resumes its upward momentum and today reached a record high above $2940, rising more than 1%. At the moment, however, the scale of these rallies has already been limited to 0.5%.
- In the coming day, all of the market's attention will be directed to Trump's possible new comments and Fed Chairman Powell's testimony before Congress. As for Powell, we should get excerpts of his speech moments before the actual start of testimony at 3pm GMT.
- NATGAS is gaining 1.5% today and also extends the rebound after the eastern part of the US continues to struggle with slightly cooler-than-average temperatures, leading to higher-than-usual demand for gas-fired power generation.
Heatmap of the volatility currently observed in the FX market. Source: xStation
