Originally published by AxiTrader
Key Takeaway
News broke yesterday that president Trump had written to Chinese President Li seeking a constructive relationship. That's a neat change from Trump's rhetorical statements and tweets which he has used as a negotiation tactic with other nations.
Perhaps it reflects the economic and military influence of China. Or perhaps it reflects a fast paced evolution of the US president whose tone appears to have changed already from the early flurry.
So, as China's reserve fall below $3 trillion and the Yuan begins to weaken again it's possible that currency tensions rise between the world's two biggest economies.
It makes today's trade data even more important than it usually is.
What You Need To Know
It's in no-one's interest that the US and China have a trade war. That's something the Chinese have said consistently since president Trump's election victory and it's something that a president fond of seeing the world in as an adversarial winner and loser battle probably knows.
Indeed as I wrote earlier today in my overnight wrap "I know I’m panglossian but I really do hope that this Administrations early days give way to a more considered plan, and crucially implementation. I’m hopeful president Trump will be like the computer in the 1983 Hollywood movie War Games and learn" that you can't always win.
That would be a fundamental shift in his approach - and a good one.
Anyway, while we wait to see how things map out in Sino-US relations traders are watching the break higher in the USDCNH and USDCNY rates and waiting for the release of today's trade and lending data.
After the December trade balance of trade surplus fell to $40.8 billion from November's $59.6 billion on the back of a big fall in exports forecasters are expecting a bounce back in January to a surplus of $47.9 for the month.
That expectation is driven by pundits forecasts for a strong bounceback in exports from China.
This data is important for more than just Chinese markets. As the second biggest economy in the world how China's trade data prints is of fundamental impact for the outlook to the global economy and for sentiment toward specific countries like Australia - and the Australian dollar.
in many ways, Chinese trade is the second most important monthly data point each month for traders after US non-farm payrolls.
So we'll be watching closely.
Turning to the yuan it's clear that the currency is at a critical juncture against the US dollar.- I'll focus on the USD/CNY one month forward offered by AxiTrader on our MT4 platform for illustrative purposes.
As you can see in the chart below the USD/CNY has been in a solid uptrend it keeps retreating to before rallying again since April 2016.
AS the chart also shows USD/CNY, like USD/CNH, has just broken the downtrend from the recent highs near seven. To put that break in context the recent low in USD/CNY was just above the 38.2% retracement of this uptrend.
So, on the daily charts the bias is for USD/CNY to head higher. But for me, and my system, a break of 6.9050 is the level that will confirm a break and that the yuan's weakness is about to accelerate.
Have a great day's trading.