APAC Morning Update - 16/02/21

The AUDUSD opens at 0.7784 and the NZDUSD opens at 0.7231

The market has basically shrugged off Victoria's and Auckland’s latest lockdown, with no new cases in NZ adding to the sense that it may well be a short and sharp one. One reason the market is shrugging it off, is good news with respect to the vaccine out of Israel. They have done studies on 600,000 people who have had 2 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and of that group there was a 94% drop in symptoms, and they were 92% less likely to develop serious illness. The wider question, for travel especially is if they can still transmit the virus, but for now we will take the positive news.

The more this kind of stuff comes out, the less relevant Covid numbers become, and the more blasé people get. This could be a mistake as we are probably a good 6 months away from getting the bulk of people vaccinated, but it gives a clue into the markets reactions to it all anyway.

 
Global equity markets are up: Dow +0.1%, S&P 500 +0.5%, FTSE +2.5%, DAX +0.4%, CAC +1.5%, Nikkei +1.9%, Shanghai +1.4%.

Gold prices are off 0.3%, currently trading at $1,818 an ounce. WTI Crude Oil prices are up 0.6% trading at $60.1 a barrel

NZDUSD 0.7231 0.2%
NZDEUR 0.5961 0.1%
NZDGBP 0.5200 -0.2%
NZDJPY 76.15 0.5%
NZDAUD 0.9289 -0.2%
NZDCAD 0.9136 -0.3%
GBPNZD 1.9228 0.3%

AUDUSD 0.7784 0.4%
AUDEUR 0.6416 0.3%
AUDGBP 0.5596 0.0%
AUDJPY 81.99 0.7%
AUDNZD 1.0763 0.2%
GBPAUD 1.7864 0.1%