The start to the trading week was void of any economic news (or central bank comments for that matter) in the US session.
The Jackson Hole Summit later this week, will provide the fireworks with Chair Powell’s speech scheduled for Friday at 10:05 AM ET, highlighting the speaker schedule.
Today, the USD was mostly lower with modest declines vs the EUR, GBP, CHF, AUD and NZD. The USD was unchanged vs the CAD and higher vs the JPY. Overall, the CHF and the EUR were the strongest of the major currencies, while the JPY was the weakest.
The lower dollar came despite rising yields. The 10 and 30-year yields both reached new lows going back years. For the 10-year, the yield moved to the highest level since November 2007. For the 30-year, the yield reached the highest level since 2011.
A snapshot of the US debt market shows:
- 2-year yield is trading at 5.0048%, +6.9 basis points and back above the 5% level
- 5-year yield 4.471%, +9.0 based points
- 10-year yield 4.343%, +9.3 basis points
- 30-year yield 4.451% up 7.2 basis points
Rising yields sent mortgage rates to the highest level since 2000 near 7.4% for 30 year mortgages.
The rising yields did not deter the dollar from falling. Nor did it deter stocks from moving higher, especially the riskier NASDAQ stocks. This was a shift from the recent price action.
The NASDAQ index snapped a 4-day losing streak with a solid 1.56% gain. The market was enthused about Nvidia whose shares rose 8.47% ahead of it’s earnings on Wednesday after the close.
Other big gainers today included:
- Palo Alto networks up 16.44% after better-than-expected earnings after the close on Friday
- Moderna snapped back higher by 7.87%
- Tesla also advanced sharply with a 4.79% rise
- Crowdstrike rose 4.27%
- Snowflake rose 3.12%
- Broadcom rose 2.08%
- Adobe rose 2.43%.
In other markets:
- Crude oil is trading down $-0.46 or -0.57% at $80.20
- Gold rose $5.73 or 0.30% at $1894.63
- Silver rose $0.55 or 2.46% at $23.29
- Bitcoin was fairly steady at $26,122