After hanging on a knife-edge, the win for Joe Biden seems all but confirmed now (baring and Trump legal win) and gold spot gold trades 0.55% higher. The official date that Biden enters the White House is set to be 20th January 2021 but there could be some delays as the current President seems to be in his usual defiant mood. Moving back to the market reaction, Asian equities traded higher at the beginning of the week. Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 2.26% (highest close since 1991), Australia’s ASX is up 1.75% and China’s Shanghai Composite pushed 1.68% higher. The sentiment seems to be driven by the fact Biden may unravel all the work Trump did protectionism. There has been talk that he will be easier on China and less likely to pull the trigger on tariffs.
In the rest of the metals complex, silver gained 0.70% but failed to push past the $26.02 resistance level. This level was the previous consolidation low from mid-August to mid-September and seems to be a pretty stubborn area. Spot WTI jumped over 2%, while zinc (1.43%), lead (1.34%) and aluminium (0.34%) all traded higher overnight.
In FX markets, the onshore Chinese yuan pushed to 6.5789 per dollar (highest since 2018), after seeing levels above 6.65 last week. In the majors, the commodities currencies stole the show. AUD/USD and NZDUSD are trading half a percent higher, while USD/CAD has dropped 0.32%.
It was a slow overnight session for tier one economic data. Australian building approvals showed some impressive but expected gains of 15.4% vs previous -2.3%. In Japan, the Bank of Japan summary noted the need to avoid prematurely ending easy monetary policy.
To the day ahead and the highlights include German trade balance and comments from ECB’s Lagarde, BoE’s Bailey, ECB’s Mersch, BoE’s Haldane, Fed’s Mester and Harker.